Abstract: People once died of nostalgia. The physicians who tried to cure them were "motion detectors." And the moving they sought was both without and within the body, along trade routes and nervous fibers. Pathologies of Motion tells the remarkable story of how a transient mental illness that has become a global currency helps us detect the birth of capitalist modernity rippling under the skin. As Goodman's own symptomatic reading demonstrates, medical debates on nostalgia and eighteenth-century physiology more in general help us revarnish old forms of materialism and recenter the body within theories of social mediation.
Thomas Dodman (Sun,) studied this question.