Scorbutic nostalgia

Abstract

Scurvy was a nutritional disease with many unpleasant physical symptoms, but it was attended by some unusual accompaniments in the sensory apparatus and in the emotions. These were specified by Thomas Trotter in the 1790s and included an over-stimulated imagination focused on images of food and home, capable of inducing fits of ecstatic pleasure and dismay. Joseph Banks called this excitement ‘nostalgia’, actually suffering from it in the Arafura Sea when sailing home in the Endeavour. Trotter called it scorbutic nostalgia, noting how often its victims would give way to floods of tears after having dreamed of home, only to wake to the dismal reality of the ship. Calenture is not a nutritional disease, but it induces a fantasy almost identical with that of scorbutic nostalgia. The victim hallucinates a pastoral landscape on the ocean's back, and does everything possible to enter it. The hallucination is not specified as home but it is, to borrow the French name for nostalgia, a maladie du pais, in which a fantasy of earth replaces the fact of the sea. In this article I argue, along with Thomas Trotter, Erasmus Darwin and Jean Starobinski, that in their effects on the senses and the passions, calenture and scorbutic nostalgia are in effect the same: they are both ecstatic states of nervous excitement arising from a radical disruption of the victim's sense of position in time and space. How this disruption comes about in cases of scurvy I attempt to explain not as a yearning for the reality of home or land, but as an obsessive engagement with an experience that is present but accessible only through the imagination, either as a vision of delights intolerably impalpable or as one luxuriously and voluptuously enjoyed.