What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire and the Time of a Deadly Emotion by Thomas Dodman (review)

Until recently, the concept of nostalgia has been the purview of scholars of literature or sociology. Historians have paid it scant attention, usually relegating it to the wistful, hence less unreliable, spectrum of memory. In this meticulously researched work, Dodman argues that the refusal to take nostalgia seriously as a historical category allows its persistence as an ahistorical, universal feeling that overlooks the significant societal role that it plays. He sets out to prove that as a phenomenon grounded in everyday practices, it should be accepted as a viable source for understanding sociological or political developments at any given time. He traces its unusual trajectory from clinical disease, causing some patients to sicken and die, to an emotion that was mobilized to abet settlement in colonial Algeria. This trajectory, he argues, makes it a useful historical concept in understanding how nostalgic sensibilities developed in relation to monumental historical change, notably war and empire.

Dodman's monograph starts in the seventeenth century when Johannes Hofer coined the work in a medical dissertation about the mysterious disease afflicting Swiss mercenaries far from their homeland. Although Hofer sunk into medical obscurity, his theory gained traction. Dodman traces the diffusion and impact of the text as the medical profession tried to unravel the dimensions of the disease from the seventeenth century through the Napoleonic wars and into the conquest of Algeria.

The book starts with an introduction that engages with the scholarship and debates about the concept to date to illustrate its historicity. The next seven chapters analyze the different stages of its development from a clinical diagnosis in the treatment of military personnel afflicted with the acute, debilitating maladie du pays to the less enervating mal du pays that was used judiciously as a unifying tactic, whether for the creation of "pal battalions" (battalions comprising friends and neighbors) or colonial communities of settlement. The book ends with a conclusion that situates "nostalgia in history." Throughout the book, Dodman engages with the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of relevant moments.

The first two chapters examine the impact of Hofer's work and its progression from "medical maverick" status to its acceptance as the source of a valid clinical diagnosis. Dodman emphasizes the agricultural and social crises that beset Europe from the early sixteenth through the seventeenth century. The structural transformations that occurred in the countryside following these disruptions, combined with concomitant wars and civil upheavals, set the stage for nostalgia's clinical dimension to develop. Early patients were Swiss mercenaries engaged in war far from home, but by the mid-eighteenth-century, nostalgia "'proper' was being reported in the armed forces across Europe" (59).

The next two chapters treat the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. Alluding to relevant social theories past and present, Dodman suggests that clinical nostalgia in the armed forces emerged as a result of the clash between the Prussian-style military model and an emerging political culture with an emphasis on patriotism, civic equality, and individual autonomy. He argues that the Napoleonic Wars saw the first attempt by military doctors to understand the psychoneuroses of war.

The last three chapters cover the "golden age" of clinical nostalgia in the 1820s and 1830s through its decline as a medical concept at century's end. Clinical nostalgia reached a peak with physicians such as Philippe Pinel, the father of moral (and more humane) psychiatric therapy, and medical faculties such as those in Paris, Montpellier, and Strasbourg that engaged in treatment of emotional traumas resulting from war and displacement. The least successful chapter in the book deals with "nostalgia in the tropics."

At the outset, Dodman adheres to the general schema by examining the nostalgia of the military personnel and the medical physicians' responses to it. Unfortunately, he fails to tease out the differing reasons for military mal du pays. Was the nostalgia predicated on war weariness, the hope...