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

Focusing on the medical term nostalgia and the related French phrase mal du pays (identified as a dangerous disease in 1685), Dodman sets out to write about nostalgia as a "historical emotion" and as a "transtemporal category" (15). His itinerary begins in 1688, when the term nostalgia was coined by Johannes Hofer, a medical student at Basel seeking to give a place in medical nosologies to the disease that was already known as Heimweh (homesickness) in German and mal du pays in French. It ends in 1884, when the French army ceased to recognize nostalgia as a pathology.

According to Hofer, the disease nostalgia afflicted the imagination, arousing constant images of one's native land, thereby producing an overwhelming desire to return to it, extreme sadness, a sluggish heart rate and circulation, impaired digestion, irregular respiration, nausea, fevers and even death. In the eighteenth century, when Heimweh and mal du pays were particularly associated with migrants and militiamen from the Swiss Alps, the neologism "nostalgia" became widely accepted among learned physicians.

Besides offering an overview of the main references to the disease in the international scientific exchanges of the Enlightenment, Dodman mentions that Rousseau commented on mal du pays and hemvé in a letter of 1763. Nonetheless, he does not acknowledge that in this letter Rousseau also used the term regret to refer both to those "dying" of it (mourir de regret) and to the more familiar emotion oriented to the past: "we miss the good old days" (on regrette le bon temps d'autrefois). It is unfortunate that Dodman fails to understand the significance of this keyword in the history of nostalgia: he mistranslates Chateaubriand's regret d'une patrie as "regret for the homeland," and thus assumes that it meant "the opposite of nostalgia" (126). It is at such points that his discussion of the linear though convoluted transformation of "nostalgia" from a "pathological" form of homesickness to an "innocuous, even comforting longing for the past" (3) is the least convincing.

The most valuable part of the book is its examination of the changing views of French physicians during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1792–1815), when medicalized nostalgia reached epidemic proportions, and in the 1820s and 1830s, when veterans were filling French hospitals and some thirty doctoral dissertations on this topic were published in Paris and Montpellier. At first, the dominant view was that nostalgia affected sensitive people, making them feel, as the French army surgeon Denis Guerbois put it in 1803, the "pressing need to return to their first home," and thus French physicians sought to improve the physical symptoms of homesick soldiers by giving them hope and often sending them back home on sick leave (75). This was still the remedy recommended by Pinel in his brief article of 1821, which suggested that the terrible and widespread effects of nostalgia were caused by the laws on conscription and recruitment of soldiers. Dodman helpfully situates his thorough discussion of medical views of nostalgie against the background of changing norms of masculinity and of republican and imperial recruitment policies that proved alienating at a time when a third of the people of France spoke Breton, Basque, or German, rather than French.

Seeking to offer an alternative to Svetlana Boym's study of the changing meanings of "nostalgia," Dodman looks beyond the views of the educated elites to try to "grasp this nostalgia as a social phenomenon grounded in everyday practices" (8) and, in the process, becomes acutely aware that his "quest is hampered by the limitation of sources" (95). We see this in particular in his meticulous reading of published and unpublished letters sent home by soldiers during the Napoleonic wars. While Dodman finds a good number of references to their homesickness and to how they had overcome their sadness, we have no evidence that those who wrote...