Nostalgia

Abstract

Searching in 1688 for the perfect word to express the strange emotional and mental symptoms seen in Swiss mercenaries fighting far from home, medical student Johannes Hofer decided to make up his own. Looking back to ancient Greece, the birthplace of western European medicine, Hofer settled on the term nostalgia, a combination of the words nosos (return to the native land) and algos (suffering or grief). Nostalgia was literally the pain that came from the intense but unfulfilled desire to go home, and for the next 200 years it remained a constant category in medical writings. Seen as the occupational disease of sailors and soldiers, nostalgia could lead to various mental and physical problems. Those suffering from the condition avoided contact with others, preferring solitude and silence. They experienced heart palpitations, loss of appetite, constipation, and troubled sleep, and if left untreated their condition often resulted in suicide. Therapies varied among physicians, who used strengthening cordials, mental diversions, bloodletting, and promises of being returned home to help ease their patients' symptoms. In England, one physician classed it as a kind of “pathetic insanity” only seen among foreigners, but in 1781 the army surgeon Robert Hamilton challenged this assumption by reporting a case of nostalgia in a British recruit. The young man “complained of universal weakness, but no fixed pain”, and after 3 months of suffering he had become “quite emaciated…like one in the last stage of a consumption”. When a nurse finally told Hamilton that the young man longed for home, he took immediate action, promising him an early furlough once he regained strength. 2 months later the man had recovered and Hamilton negotiated his leave. By the end of the 19th century, nostalgia had lost credibility as a disease category. In 1899, The Lancet published an opinion piece defending the Royal College of Physicians' decision to exclude it from its “Nomenclature of Diseases”, arguing that it was “a purely selfish disorder” and unworthy of medical classification. Today, nostalgia has shed its original medical trappings, moving instead into the world of the imagination and the arts, which attempt to evoke through memory, music, and poetry the buried pain of all those longing for an unrecoverable past.