What Nostalgia Was - (Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning) by Thomas Dodman (Paperback)

About the Book

In What Nostalgia Was, historian Thomas Dodman traces the history of clinical "nostalgia" from when it was first coined in 1688 to describe deadly homesickness until the late nineteenth century, when it morphed into the benign yearning for a lost past we are all familiar with today. Dodman explores how people, both doctors and sufferers, understood nostalgia in late seventeenth-century Swiss cantons (where the first cases were reported) to the Napoleonic wars and to the French colonization of North Africa in the latter 1800s. A work of transnational scope over the longue duree, the book is an intellectual biography of a "transient mental illness" that was successively reframed according to prevailing notions of medicine, romanticism, and climatic and racial determinism. At the same time, Dodman adopts an ethnographic sensitivity to understand the everyday experience of living with nostalgia. In so doing, he explains why nostalgia was such a compelling diagnosis for war neuroses and generalized socioemotional disembeddedness at the dawn of the capitalist era and how it can be understood as a powerful bellwether of the psychological effects of living in the modern age.

Book Synopsis

Nostalgia today is seen as essentially benign, a wistful longing for the past. This wasn't always the case, however: from the late seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth, nostalgia denoted a form of homesickness so extreme that it could sometimes be deadly.

What Nostalgia Was unearths that history. Thomas Dodman begins his story in Basel, where a nineteen-year-old medical student invented the new diagnosis, modeled on prevailing notions of melancholy. From there, Dodman traces its spread through the European republic of letters and into Napoleon's armies, as French soldiers far from home were diagnosed and treated for the disease. Nostalgia then gradually transformed from a medical term to a more expansive cultural concept, one that encompassed Romantic notions of the aesthetic pleasure of suffering. But the decisive shift toward its contemporary meaning occurred in the colonies, where Frenchmen worried about racial and cultural mixing came to view moderate homesickness as salutary. An afterword reflects on how the history of nostalgia can help us understand the transformations of the modern world, rounding out a surprising, fascinating tour through the history of a durable idea.

Review Quotes

"Through painstaking analysis of medical treatises and dissertations, as well as military and literary sources, Dodman provides an important longue durée exploration of the rise and fall of nostalgia as a medical malady, akin to treatment of hysteria and other shifting, and gendered, diagnoses. Studies of this kind are essential to show how emotions play out in distinct historical moments, how they are political and politicized, and connect to ideas about identity in the past as in the present."-- "Isis"

"What Nostalgia Was is undoubtedly the best of the new wave of nostalgia studies. Dodman recounts the history of nostalgia in richly contextualized detail with thorough research and thoughtful, persuasive interpretations. This book is an impressive achievement."-- "Mark Micale, University of Illinois"

"What Nostalgia Was is by far the most thorough and interesting investigation ever written into how physicians and others came to define a disease they labeled 'nostalgia' and how the phenomenon evolved over the two centuries from 1688 to 1884. Remarkably creative and original, this book has significant implications for how we understand the history of the emotions, the history of psychiatry, and the history of modern European society."-- "David A. Bell, Princeton University"

"Dodman (French, Columbia Univ.) delves into the history of the medical and non-medical diagnoses of nostalgia. His research took him into various archives of the French military, and these archives inform his analysis and presentation. As a medical phenomenon, nostalgia first came to prominence as a condition affecting French troops deployed in faraway places (though definitions of faraway varied with each sufferer). Nostalgia extended beyond feelings of homesickness; its symptoms could result in major physical disability and even death. During the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, military surgeons and doctors increasingly used the diagnosis to help conscripted soldiers combating illness and to elevate their own status in the military. Later, French imperialism in North Africa both revived and challenged the medical diagnosis of nostalgia. As the age of scientific medicine dawned, nostalgia gradually lost its standing as a creditable diagnosis and was relegated to the realm of (non-medical) emotions. Dodson argues that medical nostalgia's shifting dimensions over time illustrate a dynamic modernism; the case he builds in this text is perhaps its greatest achievement. Highly recommended."-- "CHOICE"

"This is one of the most remarkable volumes I have read in over a quarter of a century of reviewing books." -- "H-France"

"Today the word [nostalgia] connotes poignancy more than suffering, but Dodman's What Nostalgia Was reminds us that nostalgia once referred to a severe and potentially fatal kind of melancholy."-- "Inside Higher Ed"

About the Author

Thomas Dodman is assistant professor in the Department of French at Columbia University.