This mesmerizing new aesthetic mode [of the late twentieth-century film] itself emerged as an elaborate symptom the waning our historicity, our lived possibility experiencing history in some active way. I don't remember any longer whether I am responsible for this term [i.e the nostalgia film], which still seems to me indispensable, provided you understand that the fashion-plate, historicist films it designates are in no way to be grasped as passionate expressions that older longing once called --Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic Late Capitalism (1) I. Introduction AMONG THE MANY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WRITERS SEDULOUS TO ENACT what Adam Smith called his era's love William Cullen, the well-esteemed Edinburgh physician and Professor Medicine at Glasgow and later Edinburgh, deserves a place in the first rank. As its title suggests, his Nosology, or a Systematic Arrangement Diseases, By Classes', Orders, Genera, a,d Species, with the Distinguishing Characters Each, and the Outlines the Systems Sauvages, Linnaeus, Vogel, Sagar, and Macbride aspired to be the key to all nosologies (classifications of human illness according to a Linnaean botanical model), for it provided synopses all the major existing schemes. It had the widest influence, as well. First published in 1769 and then reprinted without interruption into the early nineteenth century, Cullen's disease circulated around the emerging imperial with British doctors on voyages conquest and exploration, and with the nation's armies fighting on the continent; it also enjoyed great popularity at home as a handbook and a teaching manual. Cullen translated his own work (from Latin to English) and revised it continually, thereby testifying not only to the love system but also to the truth Smith's self-knowing corollary: We take pleasure in beholding the perfection so beautiful and grand a system, and we are uneasy until we remove any obstruction that can in the least disrupt or encumber the regularity its motions. (2) However, there was such an obstruction, encumbering both systems, medical and imperial, and it bore the name nostalgia. Unlike the predecessors scrupulously catalogued in his epic title, who had classified with melancholia and other likely relatives among the mental illnesses, Cullen moved into the class called Locales (impairments a part the body) and, within that class, he placed it in the order the Dysorexiae, the false or defective appetites. There it stood, flanked by some unlikely next kin, in the following sequence: Bulimia (Appetite for a greater quantity food than can be digested); Polydispsia (Preternatural thirst), Pica (A desire eating what is not Satyriasis (Excessive desire venery, in men); Nymphomania (Uncontrolable [sic] desire venery, in women); (In persons absent from their native country, a vehement desire revisiting it); Anorexia (Want appetite for food); and more. (3) As if aiming for greater precision, Cullen also distinguished between a simplex and a complex (nostalgia accompanied by other diseases). Yet, for all his attempts at taxonomical precision, an uneasy footnote at the start Dysorexiae offered a retraction sorts: I have formerly observed that the Morositates Sauvages are improperly referred to the class Vesaniae. I have therefore brought them under the Locales, as almost every species Dysorexiae is evidently an affection a part, rather than the whole body. Nostalgia alone, if it be really a disease, cannot properly come under this class, but I could not well separate this uncertain disease from the other Dysorexiae. (4) The systematizing project falters, short its end, and nostalgia, almost squeezed out, occupies an uncertain place at the bottom the page. …
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Jul 31, 2024
Zicheng Geng 
Open Access