Nostalgia’s Exit

As the twentieth century arrived and advanced, nostalgia began losing its connection to medicine, transforming into a historical oddity rather than a clinical entity. Although historically conscripts were more vulnerable to the disease than voluntary soldiers, the disease had disappeared from American military records by World War I, when the army services draftees stood at a staggering 72%, pointing to nostalgia’s exit from the American medical psyche.

After two hundred years, the medical form of nostalgia as a mental illness faded from psychiatry and gained popularity as a positive emotion within psychology. On February 13, 1913, less than a year before his death, S. Weir Mitchell addressed the Physician’s Club of Chicago, reviewing his experiences as a surgeon in the Civil War some fifty years earlier. He noted that “. . . cases of nostalgia, homesickness, were serious additions to the peril of wounds and disease, and a disorder we rarely see nowadays. I regret that no careful study was made of what was, in some instances, an interesting psychic malady, making men hysteric and incurable except by discharge. Today, aided by German perplexities, we would ask the victim a hundred and twenty-one questions, consult their subconscious mind and dreams, why they wanted to go home, and do no better than let them go as hopeless.” Nostalgia as a medical diagnosis disappeared entirely with the arrival of World War I, replaced by diagnoses such as shell shock and, later, post-traumatic stress disorder.