Curing Nostalgia
Throughout its clinical lifespan, experts agreed on the severity of the disease as it spread and overtook patients, urging repatriation as the last and most effective cure for those on the brink of death. Nostalgia was described by William Falconer in A Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions upon Disorders of the Body (1788) as a disorder “. . . said to begin with melancholy, sadness, love of solitude, silence, loss of appetite for both solid and liquid food, prostration of strength, and a hectic fever in the evening; which is frequently accompanied with livid or purple spots upon the body.” He recommended “Peruvian bark” as the best remedy, “especially when joined with opiates; but when the disorder is violent, nothing avails but returning to their own country.”
Nostalgia was viewed by some experts as a moral vice, developing during long periods between battles. Therefore, a solution was to keep soldiers busied and occupied. In 1793, a French doctor recommended physical punishment and instilling fear in soldiers to cure nostalgia. Nostalgia began appearing in the American medical literature during the Civil War. Theodore Calhoun, a military doctor with the Union Army, found nostalgia to be much less of a problem in units frequently engaged in battle; inactivity encouraged outbreaks of nostalgia among troops. Calhoun also noted that recruits from the country were more severely affected by nostalgia than those recruited from cities, an observation made earlier by the French.
In 1883, William A. Hammond echoed previous prognoses highlighting the escapist imagination of bored and inactive soldiers, resulting in mental apathy and then the shutting down of functional organs. Surgeon D. J. Larrey, in his 1823 Surgical Essays, emphasized the importance of preventive measures by elevating spirits and preventing melancholy, so symptoms do not grow to the degree to which it takes a person’s life. Accounts by overseeing physicians documented the rapid decline in patients’ health, sometimes afflicting death within days.