Nostalgia and Its Absence in the Americas
By sharing the pathological commonality of compulsory mobilization, nostalgia verged on being classified as an occupational illness. Victims included soldiers, sailors, and displaced people. Nostalgia was first linked to captured Africans as scorbutic nostalgia. Thomas Trotter, in the 1790s, described a form of scorbutic nostalgia among sea voyagers, resulting in a combination of scurvy, suicidal excitement, and brooding. There were similarities between scorbutic nostalgia and calenture, the sea variant of nostalgia suffered by seamen, sharing the symptom of psychotic fantasies of land. Fatalities of captured enslaved people at sea were at times attributed to aggravations from nostalgia that would compound other illnesses.
Much like its Swiss connection, during the Civil War it was claimed that men from the New England region were more susceptible to the illness. William A. Hammond wrote that Anglo-Saxons, especially Americans, were least attached to places and less likely than any other group to suffer from the disease. Inhabitants of "simplistic" cultures from wild and mountainous regions in Europe like Savoy, Lapland, Scotland, and Switzerland were deemed more susceptible. Native Americans were understood to also suffer from severe nostalgia if separated from home. However, pain and homesickness experienced by African Americans under slavery went unacknowledged during the antebellum years.
In eighteenth-century North America, enslaved African Americans were believed to lack the emotional sensitivity and capacity to feel homesickness. The only published account of an enslaved person falling victim to nostalgia is by an American physician in 1817. According to Jesse Torrey, an escaped slave named Anna jumped to her death after hiding in an attic due to the disease. Anna’s depiction as an abnormally large woman further illustrates the oddity in black physiological studies and its neglect of affective health in black bodies. In Latin America and non-anglophone writings, African bodies were explained as possessing innate differences, thereby racializing the pathology to support an ideology that accepted the enslavement of an entire group of people based on race and geographic origin. By ascribing suicide attempts to an violent sickness, political acts of resistance were neutralized.
By the mid-nineteenth century, emotions within the black bodies became exaggerated, characterized as possessing a strong propensity towards raw and destructive emotions. While diagnoses of extreme homesickness in enslaved black Americans were almost non-existent, white doctors came to believe black soldiers were more prone to the illness than white soldiers during the Civil War. British homeopathic practitioner, Marmaduke Blake Sampson, acknowledged African sentience, but his empathy towards enslavement was representative of the creative debates on the physiology of black bodies of that period. Sampson proposed to return enslaved blacks to Africa out of concern for the nostalgic tolls on the body without challenging the institution of slavery.