History and the Politics of Nostalgia

In 1688 the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer published a tract in which, after consider ing the terms nostomania and philopatridomania, he settles on a combination of the Greek words nostos and algos to describe the pain resulting from the desire to return to one's home (381). Thus the word nostalgia was born, in a text claiming that a properly scientific term was lacking in order to accurately identify a condition that Hofer insisted was a clinical entity and, as such, was above all of medical interest. Throughout eighteenth-century Europe the word would gradually be adopted by specialists and laypeople alike to describe a disease provoked by excessive attachment to a distant homeland, a condition at first thought to be common particularly among natives of mountainous regions. By the end of the eighteenth century, the notion was expanded to include pathological attachment to any faraway place and, later, to distant times and persons.