On Nostalgia. David Berry
So nostalgia literally means ‘pain associated with home’ – or, in slightly more familiar terms, ‘homesickness.’ This is not a coincidence, but more relevantly, it’s also not a case of fancy medical-speak being dumbed down for popular consumption. At least not generally: the English word homesickness is a more or less direct translation of nostalgia. But the original term is French, maladie du pays, and not only does it specifically refer to the tendency of the Swiss to powerfully miss their home country, it precedes Hofer by at least thirty years. Hofer’s coinage brought a specifically medical dimension, insomuch as medicine as we know it existed in his time: Hofer’s observations were quite detailed, but still entirely anecdotal, and subject to a lot of conjecture. What he lacked in scientific rigour he made up for with linguistics, attempting to legitimize medicine’s dominion over the concept with multiple coinages, including nostomania (obsession with home, which, as you’ll see in a second, is probably more accurate to the ‘disease’ as he conceived it), philopatridomania (obsessive love of one’s homeland), and, years later, in the second edition of his thesis, pothopatridalgia (pain from the longing for the home of one’s fathers, which certainly has the advantage of precision, if not rhythm).
Though the difference between mere homesickness and medical nostalgia was mostly a case of ancient language, Hofer nevertheless describes a serious disease, one that could progress from simple physical ailments like ringing in the ears or indigestion to near-catatonia and even death. Its root cause, according to Hofer, was ‘the quite continuous vibration of animal spirits through those fibres of the middle brain in which impressed traces of ideas of the fatherland still cling.’ As Helmut Illbruck explains in his book Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease, essentially what that means is that the nostalgic suffers from a powerful obsession with their home that eventually makes them entirely insensate to any other experience or stimulation. Illbruck points out that the action Hofer describes does loosely capture how the brain seems to store, process, and recall memories – we’ll get into that in a bit – which may explain some of why his concept caught on, at least in the medical circles in which it persisted for the next few hundred years.
As it happens, though, a primordial understanding of the structure of the mind isn’t the only key insight that would stick to nostalgia even as its conception developed. There are two other big ones. First, Hofer recognized that nostalgia was less about whatever the nostalgic claimed to be missing than about ‘the strength of the imagination alone’: it seemed to have less to do with any material differences in the patient’s circumstances than with the collective weight of their memories, even though those were centred on a very real and specific place. Hofer’s final, curiously potent observation is his suggested cure, which he meant quite sincerely, but which elegantly captures the futility of trying to tame nostalgia, disease or otherwise: ‘Nostalgia admits no remedy other than a return to the Homeland.’ In all his observations and diagnoses, Hofer does not seem to fully appreciate that home is often more time than place. The proof of this will reveal itself as nostalgia evolves into something so incurable that it stops being a disease entirely, and its longing begins to be associated specifically with times past – but we are getting slightly ahead of ourselves.
Doctors proceeded to speculate about the causes of and potential cures for nostalgia until roughly the twentieth century, often ignoring Hofer’s observation about the imagination’s effects, causing some curious mutations in the idea. Nostalgia did remain almost the exclusive province of the Swiss for the first few hundred years after its naming – one of the original German words for homesickness, in fact, was Schweizerkrankheit, or ‘the Swiss illness.’ Hofer’s near-contemporary Johann Jakob Scheuchzer – a Swiss naturalist who was chiefly interested in rescuing his countrymen’s reputation from accusations of weakness – suggested that it was the change in air pressure (and maybe even quality) that made them so prone to debilitating longing. He suggested that a brief stay at the top of a tower or on a hill might restore some of their strength. There isn’t much proof Scheuchzer’s conception of the disease or cure ever really worked, but there is some indication that this sort of thinking is where Switzerland got its reputation as a healthful place to recover in a sanatorium or spa. Well after Scheuchzer, eighteenth-century physicians spent some time looking for a physical locus for nostalgia – a specific brain structure or bone – which was just as futile, with even less of an impact on Swiss tourism.
Gradually, the notion of nostalgia attached itself almost exclusively to soldiers – Swiss mercenaries being very popular hires in armies across the continent, and doctors being a regular part of army life. It would take a little more than two centuries for doctors to figure out that there might be something more than a mysterious nerve disorder causing young men whose sole job was dismembering other humans and dying gruesomely to yearn for the comforts of home; in the meantime, cures and coping methods grew a little more creative. There are stories, including one from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique, of foreign officers banning the playing of Swiss ranz-des-vaches – cow-based folk songs, historically played by herdsmen on horns as they drove their cattle down from the mountain pastures – and even the sound of cowbells, lest it paralyze their troops in nostalgic reverie. (It became a tenet of folk wisdom about the Swiss that the ranz-des-vaches had this power over them; it featured as metaphor or plot point in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophical dialogues, dramas, poems, and operas, particularly by German Romantics, who were constitutionally interested in a disease that spoke so acutely to our conceptions of self.)
By the 1800s, the terrors of nostalgia finally spread to other countries’ soldiers. Russian physicians recommended burying alive anyone who started showing symptoms, to stop the spread of the disease – which apparently did prove quite effective. On the other side of the Atlantic, the American Civil War saw several outbreaks among the young fighting men, even though they technically had never left their homeland, per se. Their physicians were a bit kinder, suggesting occasional removal from front-line fighting would bolster their spirits (not that the doctors didn’t also suspect that the nostalgia betrayed a deep flaw in their character). The American army did apparently continue furtive explorations of the concept all the way up to the Second World War, chiefly as a way to reduce desertion, and nostalgia did maintain some interest for psychologists and psychiatrists in the first half of the twentieth century, albeit in a downgraded form: it became less disease than symptom or even disposition, usually of people who had far bigger and more immediate problems (a 1987 survey of its common historical-psychological invocations cited ‘acute yearning for a union with the preoedipal mother, a saddening farewell to childhood, a defence against mourning, or a longing for a past forever lost’). Despite these last tendrils, the Civil War was really the last time anybody was diagnosed as a nostalgic, as such: nostalgia was largely abandoned by the medical community by the last decades of the nineteenth century. This seems to have had less to do with any particular breakthroughs regarding brain structure or mental health than with the general inability of anyone to make meaningful headway on understanding, let alone curing, nostalgia.
As it moved out of the medical realm and into the cultural, though, nostalgia did not fully shed its strange stigma. It first took hold in the worlds of philosophy and theory, albeit used interchangeably with the idea of homesickness, where it tended to be classed as a symptom of disorder – if not of the individual, then of the society they had built. Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, is indicative of this line of thought: ‘One is no longer home anywhere, so in the end one longs to be back where one can somehow be at home because it is the only place where one would wish to be at home.’ From almost its earliest non-medical considerations, nostalgia was regarded as a kind of reaction to the modern condition, a port in the discombobulating and alien storm that was modern life. Philosophers, critics, and theorists are still exploring variations on this theme, though as an object of critical theory nostalgia has gradually lost any meaningful sense of place (or even, arguably, a time) and gotten more tightly entwined with the notion of authenticity and our search for the same (as such, its usefulness and meaning spiked slightly with the waxing and waning of postmodernist thought). This is what underlies something like Baudrillard’s observation in Simulacra and Simulation that ‘when the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning’: the underlying implication is that if we were awash