What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion (Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning)

Nostalgia today is seen as essentially benign, a wistful longing for the past. This wasn't always the case, however: from the late seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth, nostalgia denoted a form of homesickness so extreme that it could sometimes be deadly. __What Nostalgia Was__ unearths that history. Thomas Dodman begins his story in Basel, where a nineteen-year-old medical student invented the new diagnosis, modeled on prevailing notions of melancholy. From there, Dodman traces its spread through the European republic of letters and into Napoleon's armies, as French soldiers far from home were diagnosed and treated for the disease. Nostalgia then gradually transformed from a medical term to a more expansive cultural concept, one that encompassed Romantic notions of the aesthetic pleasure of suffering. But the decisive shift toward its contemporary meaning occurred in the colonies, where Frenchmen worried about racial and cultural mixing came to view moderate homesickness as salutary. An afterword reflects on how the history of nostalgia can help us understand the transformations of the modern world, rounding out a surprising, fascinating tour through the history of a durable idea. Nostalgia today is seen as a wistful but ultimately benign longing for the past—a positive emotion innate to all human beings. It hasn’t always been so. As the saying goes, nostalgia “ain’t what it used to be”; indeed, people used to die of it. This book unearths the forgotten history of clinical nostalgia, from the coining of the term itself in 1688 to its removal from medical discourse in the late nineteenth century. Throughout this time and across much of the North Atlantic world, “nostalgia” meant a deadly form of homesickness found especially among soldiers, slaves, and colonial settlers far from their homes. This book charts the evolving scientific and cultural debates that framed the disease, ultimately turning a precise medical term into an expansive cultural concept tied to a romantic aesthetic. At the same time, it delves into the experiences of those who suffered from homesickness on the battlefields of Napoleonic Europe or during the French conquest of North Africa, sketching a little-known page in the pre-history of modern psychiatry and war trauma. A historical emotion, born of the changes wrought by war, empire, and capitalism, nostalgia forces us to rethink the very temporalities and spatialities of modernity itself Nostalgia today is seen as essentially benign, a wistful longing for the past. This wasn't always the case, however: from the late seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth, nostalgia denoted a form of homesickness so extreme that it could sometimes be deadly. What Nostalgia Was unearths that history. Thomas Dodman begins his story in Basel, where a nineteen-year-old medical student invented the new diagnosis, modeled on prevailing notions of melancholy. From there, he traces its spread through the European republic of letters and into Napoleon's armies, as French soldiers far from home were diagnosed and treated for the disease. Nostalgia then gradually transformed from a medical term to a more expansive cultural concept, one that connected to Romantic notions of the aesthetic pleasure of suffering. But the decisive shift towards a benign emotion occurred in the colonies, where Frenchmen worried about excessive creolization came to view a moderate homesickness as salutary. An afterword reflects on how the history of nostalgia can help us understand the transformations of the modern world, rounding out a surprising, fascinating tour through the history of a durable idea Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction: Nostalgia as a Historical Problem 14 1. Nostalgia in 1688 29 2. The Reasons of a Passion 56 3. The Lost Pays of the Patrie 76 4. Mothers and Sons in the Time of Napoleonic War 106 5. Golden Age 137 6. Nostalgia in the Tropics 162 7. Ubi bene, ibi patria: Nostalgia Fin de Siècle 185 Afterword: Nostalgia in History 204 List of Abbreviations 210 Notes 212 Archival Sources 272 Index 276