Nostalgia as Clinical Homesickness
Like a plague that swept through Europe and then the Americas from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, all that is left of the forgotten disease are the curious pathological theories analyzed by the foremost practioners of the time. Today, nostalgia refers to the fondness associated with looking back into one’s past, while homesickness is the longing for one’s home, encompassing temporal and spatial distances. In the early years of psychiatry and neurology, unexplainable psychological behaviors were linked to insanity, defined through mania, dementia, and melancholia. During the professionalization of the medical field in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, military personnels suffered great casualties from the disease. By the turn of the twentieth century, nostalgia was no longer considered a psychiatric nosology. It was not until the 1920s that nostalgia transformed into the benign sentiment popularly understood today.