Theories of the Pathology of Nostalgia
Debates on the precedent causes, diagnostic symptoms, prognosis, and cure to nostalgia varied widely. In his 1688 medical dissertation, Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgia, Johannes Hofer invented the word nostalgia to elucidate mental anguish resulting from a severe form of homesickness. Called Heimweh by the Germans and Maladie du pays by the French, Hofer wrote: “Since it has no medical name, I have called it nostalgia, of Greek origin, from Nostos, return to one’s native land, and Algos, pain or distress.” While the condition has been mentioned in earlier materials, Hofer gave an exact interpretation of nostalgia’s features. Furthermore, Hofer described the abnormality stemmed from the brain and imagination living in the past while the body wastes away.
Seeking to form a nosological classification schema on illnesses, François Bossier de le Croix de Sauvages in Nosologia Methodica Sistems Morborum Classes (1768) distinguished between simple nostalgia, categorized by low moods and fever, and complex nostalgia, a violent disease requiring professional attention. William Cullen’s Synopsis and Nosology: Being an Arrangement and Definition of Diseases (1772) and Sauvages’ work included the extreme longing for home in the section Morositates or Delinquencies. In 1782, Thomas Arnold in Observations on the nature, kinds, causes, and prevention of insanity, lunacy, or madness classified the condition as a form of insanity. Affecting the patient’s cerebral sensibility, nostalgia was commonly described as comprised of a form of hysteria, self-imposed isolation, and a loss of desire for earthly pleasures comparable to melancholia.
Earlier theories of nostalgia continued to hold claim well into the eighteenth- and nineteenth- centuries, attributing the disease to environmental factors and temperaments of specific peoples. As a severe and fatal disease, victims of nostalgia were those who missed their homeland to such an extent that they would waste away and die from dangerous homesickness. The Swiss were believed to be more susceptible to homesickness, possibly due to a more sensitive attribute and the characteristics of their mountainous homeland. Enslaved Africans were believed to not be capable of such emotion in North America, but in South America, they were said to suffer a more primitive and uncontrollable form of nostalgia. Specific ethnic groups were supposedly predisposed to severe homesickness, at times worsened by existing maladies and aggravating onset diseases.