Homesick Warriors: Fatal Nostalgia as a Nineteenth-Century War Neurosis

People once died of nostalgia. Although it denotes a relatively snug and self-indulgent emotion to most people today, the term “nostalgia” was originally coined in 1688 to describe a serious psychological disorder. For the best part of two centuries, doctors used it to grasp a severe clinical condition, a form of debilitating melancholy induced by bouts of homesickness. Soldiers rapidly became nostalgia’s favorite victims following extraordinary tales of Swiss mercenaries succumbing to Alpine regrets at the mere sound of familiar cowbells. By the time of the Napoleonic wars, the condition allegedly crippled entire platoons of men with epidemic outbreaks of depression, motor disturbances, and physical wasting away. Such were its effects that nostalgia came to be considered one of the deadliest diseases in the French army and the sole condition warranting a systemic release from duty. Although observed through to the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, changing medical and cultural paradigms eventually undermined the diagnosis in the late 1800s, prompting taxonomic switches to neurasthenia, cafard, and pathological fatigue. Since then, soldiers have no longer been diagnosed with deadly homesickness, relegating nostalgia to quaint tales of modern medicine’s infancy and to a largely forgotten prehistory of war psychiatry.

Based on original archival and published sources, this paper traces the remarkable trajectory of this first, fully-defined soldier’s war neurosis. It considers the sophisticated clinical portrait and far-sighted therapeutic recommendations nineteenth-century health officers devised to grasp the syndrome and cure the men from their distressing encounter with war and military life. Using scant surviving evidence from soldiers’ letters, the paper also resurrects the subjective experience of nostalgia, pointing at once towards the alienating experience of conscription into modern standing armies, and to a historically-grounded, Freudian reading of war neuroses as the repetition of latent trauma.