Nostalgia, from illness to emotion

In 1688, a medical student in Basel, Johannes Hofer, defended a thesis devoted to an ailment observed in young people far from their homeland. To name it, he coined a word from two Greek terms, return and pain. Nostalgia was born as a medical category.

The ailment described was anything but vague. It was credited with physical manifestations, listlessness, loss of appetite, fever, and was seen as a serious affliction. Swiss soldiers serving abroad became its most cited example, to the point that people long spoke of the Swiss homesickness.

For a long time, nostalgia remained a concern of army physicians. It appeared in treatises, was described in conscripts, and efforts were made to prevent it. A tradition, reported by Rousseau in the eighteenth century, has it that a mountain tune was forbidden to Swiss troops because it was thought to trigger it.

This framing says as much about the period as about the state described. It reflects a conception in which attachment to one's native place became a medical matter as soon as it interfered with service, and in which emotion belonged to the body rather than to experience.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the medical category gradually faded. The word remained, but its object shifted: one was no longer nostalgic only for a place, but for an era, a childhood, a vanished world. The pain of an impossible return became that of a past that does not come back.

This move from place to time accompanied the notion's entry into literature and everyday language. Nostalgia became a feeling that could be cultivated, shared or staged, and no longer merely endured. It changed status without changing name.

Since the 2000s, the work of Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut, at the University of Southampton, has approached nostalgia as an ordinary emotion. They describe it as mixed, predominantly positive with an element of longing, and present at every age.

The nostalgic narratives collected often feature close ones and shared moments. The same studies report that nostalgia tends to arise in moments of loneliness or low mood, and that it comes with a heightened sense of connection with others.

Social judgement on nostalgia remains divided. It passes at times for a sterile refuge, a refusal of the present, at others for a resource that connects a life to its history. The two readings coexist, and each describes part of what people report.

Its collective use adds another layer. Advertising, music, reissues and period objects turn it into commercial material, and many public discourses refer to it. This register calls for a different analysis from intimate experience, even if it borrows the same word.

The history of the word above all recalls that the same experience can change classification without changing appearance. What was once an affliction has become a feeling, and nothing obliges us to think that the current classification is the last.