Nostalgia

The term was originally coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer (1669-1752), a Swiss medical student. The word is made up of two Greek roots (νόστος = nostos = returning home, and άλγος = algos = pain/longing), to refer to "the pain a sick person feels because he wishes to return to his native land, and fears never to see it again". This neologism was so successful that people forgot its origin. Moreover, its original meaning--referring to a serious medical disorder--has been lost as the word nostalgia entered everyday language. In today's common parlance it is a feeling, a yearning for a lost time and place, usually located in the near past. Homesickness is often given as a synonym for nostalgia.

During this period, from the late seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, that doctors diagnosed and treated nostalgia, it also had other names in various languages — mal du pays (country sickness) in French, Heimweh (home-pain) in German, hiraeth in Welsh, and el mal de corazón (heart-pain) in Spanish.

Cases resulting in death were known and soldiers were sometimes successfully treated by being discharged and sent home. Receiving a diagnosis was, however, generally regarded as an insult. In 1787 Robert Hamilton (1749-1830) described a case of a soldier suffering from nostalgia, who received sensitive and successful treatment:

By the 1850s nostalgia was losing its status as a particular disease and coming to be seen rather as a symptom or stage of a pathological process. It was considered as a form of melancholia and a predisposing condition among suicides. Nostalgia was, however, still diagnosed among soldiers as late as the American Civil War.

By the 1870s interest in nostalgia as a medical category had all but vanished. Most saw the decline of this serious disease as a good thing, the result of progress. Nonetheless some lamented what they saw as the loss of the feelings for home that gave rise to the illness. Of course the phenomenon of nostalgia did not disappear with its demedicalization.

Boulbry, Gaëlle and Borges, Adilson. Évaluation d’une échelle anglo-saxonne de mesure du tempérament nostalgique dans un contexte culturel français (Evaluation of an anglo-saxon scale of measurement of nostalgic mood in a French cultural context)