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.