The Time and Place of Nostalgia: Re-situating a French Disease
Resource type
Journal article
Creator (person)
O'Sullivan, L.
Date published
October 1, 2012
Abstract
The history of nostalgia as a clinical category has many highly specific national stories. This paper traces an aspect of this history, examining aspects of nostalgia's changing meanings in nineteenth-century France. Nostalgia was a disease triggered by displacement, which became medically and politically important after the French Revolution, when military surgeons encountered epidemics of nostalgia in the armed forces. Understood as a form of pathological homesickness, the category straddled environmental medicine and emerging ideas about insanity. The diagnosis became particularly important to Idéologue writers as a case study in regulating and redirecting the emotions, demonstrating the efficacy of their new “moral” treatments and an ability to generate patriotic attachment to the new nation state. Over the course of the century, nostalgia disintegrated as a medical condition reflecting a decline in environmental explanations for disease within medicine, and increasingly plastic meanings attached to nostalgic desire.
Journal title
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Volume
67
Issue
4
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
ISSN
0022-5045
eISSN
1468-4373
Official URL
Rights statement
In Copyright