ABOUT THIS BOOK
Nostalgia today is seen as essentially benign, a wistful longing for the past. This wasn't always the case, however: from the late seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth, nostalgia denoted a form of homesickness so extreme that it could sometimes be deadly.
What Nostalgia Was unearths that history. Thomas Dodman begins his story in Basel, where a nineteen-year-old medical student invented the new diagnosis, modeled on prevailing notions of melancholy. From there, Dodman traces its spread through the European republic of letters and into Napoleon's armies, as French soldiers far from home were diagnosed and treated for the disease. Nostalgia then gradually transformed from a medical term to a more expansive cultural concept, one that encompassed Romantic notions of the aesthetic pleasure of suffering. But the decisive shift toward its contemporary meaning occurred in the colonies, where Frenchmen worried about racial and cultural mixing came to view moderate homesickness as salutary. An afterword reflects on how the history of nostalgia can help us understand the transformations of the modern world, rounding out a surprising, fascinating tour through the history of a durable idea.
REVIEWS
"Today the word [nostalgia] connotes poignancy more than suffering, but Dodman's What Nostalgia Was reminds us that nostalgia once referred to a severe and potentially fatal kind of melancholy.”
— Inside Higher Ed
"Dodman (French, Columbia Univ.) delves into the history of the medical and non-medical diagnoses of nostalgia. His research took him into various archives of the French military, and these archives inform his analysis and presentation. As a medical phenomenon, nostalgia first came to prominence as a condition affecting French troops deployed in faraway places (though definitions of faraway varied with each sufferer). Nostalgia extended beyond feelings of homesickness; its symptoms could result in major physical disability and even death. During the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, military surgeons and doctors increasingly used the diagnosis to help conscripted soldiers combating illness and to elevate their own status in the military. Later, French imperialism in North Africa both revived and challenged the medical diagnosis of nostalgia. As the age of scientific medicine dawned, nostalgia gradually lost its standing as a creditable diagnosis and was relegated to the realm of (non-medical) emotions. Dodson argues that medical nostalgia's shifting dimensions over time illustrate a dynamic modernism; the case he builds in this text is perhaps its greatest achievement. Highly recommended."
— CHOICE
"This is one of the most remarkable volumes I have read in over a quarter of a century of reviewing books."
— H-France
"Through painstaking analysis of medical treatises and dissertations, as well as military and literary sources, Dodman provides an important longue durée exploration of the rise and fall of nostalgia as a medical malady, akin to treatment of hysteria and other shifting, and gendered, diagnoses. Studies of this kind are essential to show how emotions play out in distinct historical moments, how they are political and politicized, and connect to ideas about identity in the past as in the present."
— Isis
“What Nostalgia Was is undoubtedly the best of the new wave of nostalgia studies. Dodman recounts the history of nostalgia in richly contextualized detail with thorough research and thoughtful, persuasive interpretations. This book is an impressive achievement.”
— Mark Micale, University of Illinois
“What Nostalgia Was is by far the most thorough and interesting investigation ever written into how physicians and others came to define a disease they labeled ‘nostalgia’ and how the phenomenon evolved over the two centuries from 1688 to 1884. Remarkably creative and original, this book has significant implications for how we understand the history of the emotions, the history of psychiatry, and the history of modern European society.”
— David A. Bell, Princeton University
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Nostalgia as a Historical Problem - Thomas Dodman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226493138.003.0001
[Nostalgia;Emotion;Psychology;Practice;Historicity]
How is it that a late seventeenth-century diagnosis invented in Basel to treat homesick Swiss soldiers has come to describe a benign and seemingly innate trait of human psychology anywhere in the world? This introduction presents nostalgia as a historical problem, that is as a historically- and geographically-specific mood disorder that somehow came to be viewed as universal and natural—almost a “basic emotion.” It outlines a theory of practice—of emotional practices—that can account for this paradox and, in the process, outline what the history of nostalgia reveals about the transformations of the modern world. (pages 1 - 15)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
1/ Nostalgia in 1688 - Thomas Dodman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226493138.003.0002
[Nostalgia;Homesickness;Rhineland;Swiss Confederation;Mercenaries;General Crisis;Johannes Hofer;Medicine;Cartesianism;Melancholia]
This chapter reaches back to Basel and the upper Rhineland in the late seventeenth century, a place of precarious living in times of change, to understand what drove a nineteen year-old medical student from the nearby town of Mulhouse to invent nostalgia. Johannes Hofer borrowed eclectically from early modern medicine to model his Dissertatio medica de Nostalgia (1688) on prevailing accounts of melancholia. But it was the political instability of his time that led him to invent a whole new diagnosis, and in particular a crisis in the Swiss mercenary system upon which his hometown depended for its continued independence. Hofer invented nostalgia because he thought he could cure burly pikemen who broke down with homesickness when stationed abroad. In doing so, he also registered subtle changes in perceptions of time and space, a widespread sense of unease at the momentous social transformations of his epoch. (pages 16 - 42)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2/ The Reasons of a Passion - Thomas Dodman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226493138.003.0003
[Nostalgia;Enlightenment;Republic of Letters;Medicalization;Professionalization;Military medicine;Romanticism;Jean-Jacques Rousseau;Albrecht von Haller]
Nostalgia became a thing in the Age of Enlightenment, in the writings and actions of physicians and philosophes who heard about this mysterious Swiss illness. Across Europe and the North Atlantic, medical faculties debated the merits of medicalizing homesickness, outlining two competing explanations for the disease: a materialistic and deterministic one focused on environmental (atmospheric) constraints and organic transformations; and a psychological one that instead insisted on the emotional consequences of displacement and social disruption. By the end of the eighteenth century, others including the likes of Rousseau and Kant began talking of nostalgia in more benign terms as well, outlining aesthetic concerns and forms of interiority typical of a nascent romantic sensibility. But it was in the rather more prosaic medical practice and professional logics of military medicine that nostalgia truly came into its own, as French army surgeons in particular embraced the diagnosis in their battle to save soldiers’ lives and assert their own professional status. (pages 43 - 62)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3/ The Lost Pays of the Patrie - Thomas Dodman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226493138.003.0004
[Nostalgia;French Revolution;Napoleonic Empire;Patriotism;Total war;Citizen-Soldiers;Slaves;Social disembedding;Medical officers]
Throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1792-1815), nostalgia was considered one of the most widespread and dangerous diseases in the French army. Frightful epidemics swept across the ranks, in some cases decimating entire units in a matter of weeks. Illiterate peasant conscripts were deemed most at risk and typically banded together with a compatriot officer sensitive to their plight. Fearful of nostalgia’s effects, military authorities consistently granted medical leaves to homesick soldiers, in spite of the risk of malingering and desertion. This chapter maps out the surprising scale of a medical emergency scarcely imaginable to us today and which forced revolutionary legislators to compromise with their ideological agenda in the name of medical pragmatism. By comparing homesick soldiers to slaves and itinerant journeyman, it becomes possible to view these nostalgia epidemics as a form of violent alienation rendered particularly distressing in the French case by a Republican political discourse promising civic rights to these “citizen-soldiers.” If the Napoleonic epoch witnessed the birth of “total war”, it also gave rise to a first attempt at medicalizing emotional responses to war and massive social dislocation. (pages 63 - 92)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4/ Mothers and Sons in the Time of Napoleonic War - Thomas Dodman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226493138.003.0005
[Nostalgia;Homesickness;Emotion;Gender;Family;Trauma;Psychiatry;Soldiers' narratives;Veterans;Historical ethnography]
What did it feel like to be homesick in the early 1800s? This chapter tightens the lens and delves into the sensorial and affective world of those Napoleonic soldiers who suffered from nostalgia on the battlefield. Drawing from a rich collection of letters and diaries, it reconstructs their own narratives of illness in order to get as close as possible to a historical ethnography of people’s affective lives at the time. In doing so, it sheds light on the gender norms and intense family bonds that underpinned the nostalgia diagnosis. At a time when psychiatry was still in its infancy, and the notion of psychological trauma was as yet unimaginable, French military physicians already developed a sophisticated understanding of soldiers’ psychological breakdown, effectively formulating a first systematic conception of war neuroses. Paradoxically, it was the experience of demobilization after Waterloo that pushed many veterans to look upon their years in the army with a certain regret—with a comforting longing for the past that we have called “nostalgia” ever since. (pages 93 - 123)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5/ Golden Age - Thomas Dodman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226493138.003.0006
[Nostalgia;Historical semantics;Romantic disease;Tuberculosis;Patriotism;Phrenology;concepts;Honoré de Balzac;Aesthetics;Psychiatry]
In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars nostalgia progressively ceased to be a precise medical term and instead grew into a more capacious cultural category—a concept open to competing meanings. A victim of its own success, the diagnosis was adopted across the medical profession—and found equally in irritated esophagi or pronounced cranial lumps—ultimately losing much of its coherence. By mid-century, the term had also crept into vernacular language, through the writings of Balzac and playwrights drawn to this mysterious condition. Unlike other meteoric nineteenth-century mental disorders, though, nostalgia did not simply disappear when doctors began to lose interest in it. Instead, it was successfully reframed as a romantic disease akin to tuberculosis—that is a malady coupled up with a pleasurable aesthetics of suffering—and as an instinctual attachment to home all the more valuable in a society still jittery from post-revolutionary aftershocks. In moderate doses, nostalgia thus became a wholesome feeling, a perfectly natural sign of patriotic devotion. Only in the army and navy did it continue to spell disaster, as young conscripts in regimental barracks across Europe came to find out, and as French medical officers sent overseas knew only too well. (pages 124 - 148)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
6/ Nostalgia in the Tropics
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226493138.003.0007
[Nostalgia;Imperialism;Colonial settlers;Algeria;Tropical medicine;Acclimatization;Nostalgeria;1848]
The French army was hardly through with clinical nostalgia and throughout the nineteenth century the disease continued to hamper its political leaders’ ambitions of imperial expansion. Starting in 1830 it undermined attempts at establishing a viable colony in North Africa, wreaking havoc among French forces and forcing soldiers to be speedily repatriated across the Mediterranean. Increasingly, the condition was diagnosed among civilian settlers as well and, in 1848, lethal outbreaks turned an ambitious plan to resettle tens of thousands of Parisian artisans to Algeria into an embarrassing fiasco. For some, nostalgia had become a “French malady” and found a new lease of life within the budding specialization of tropical medicine. For others, it was simultaneously being superseded by new theories of climatic seasoning. This chapter follows nostalgia to “the tropics” and in the age of Empire, to uncover the surprising story of how it became central to the fraught making of French Algeria, a century before nostalgeria would come to dominate the two countries’ post-colonial aftermath.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
7/ Ubi bene, ibi patria: Nostalgia Fin de Siècle - Thomas Dodman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226493138.003.0008
[Nostalgia;Algeria;Racial theories;Fin de siècle;Imperialism;Military psychiatry;Invented traditions;Neurasthenia;Capitalist epoch;American Civil War]
More so than romantic poets, it was fears about “excessive” seasoning, creolization, and racial degeneration in the colonies that helped demedicalize nostalgia in the second half of the nineteenth century, for it promised to “preserve” Europeans overseas, by sustaining their emotional attachment to home and motherland. Rural communities formerly considered ineligible for emigration due to likely homesickness thus became ideal candidates for resettlement. Colonies came to acquire a distinctly European look-alike resemblance, a nostalgic simulacra designed to make Algeria look and, ideally, feel decidedly French. This chapter brings to a close the tortuous trajectory of clinical nostalgia by showing how its naturalization into a benign and instinctual sentiment was tied up in the articulation of modern “invented traditions” and the competing forms of territorial belonging (local, national, imperial) in the global fin de siècle. By also tracing nostalgia’s quiet afterlife in twentieth-century military psychiatry, it suggests that we view this historical emotion not as an alternative to a linear understanding of modernity as progress, but as a constitutive moment in a much more dialectical logic of social transformation characteristic of the capitalist epoch. (pages 172 - 190)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Afterword: Nostalgia in History
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226493138.003.0009
[Nostalgia;Emotions;Historicity]
While it may ultimately be impossible to disaggregate what is historically specific from what is universal in the human propensity to long for lost things—starting with home—this afterword suggests that we nonetheless take seriously the historicity of our emotions and accept that what may seem utterly natural and given to us today need not have been only a couple of centuries ago (and thus might not again in the future). That nostalgia could have appeared and changed so much in the space of a few hundred years says something about the uneven transformations of the modern world. It also says a lot about the need to account for emotions in our understanding of the past and the present.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
