When missing home looked like illness
In the seventeenth century, Swiss physician Johannes Hofer described homesickness among soldiers serving far from home as a serious bodily affliction. Their longing was associated with sleeplessness, weeping, loss of appetite, and a racing or irregular heartbeat. These were not treated as poetic flourishes: they were signs that distress could disrupt the body as well as the mind.
Hofer’s account gave the condition a medical name: nostalgia, built from Greek words for returning home and pain. The term captured a particular kind of suffering—the ache of being separated from familiar places, people, and routines.
From diagnosis to a feeling people revisit
The historical shift is striking. Today, nostalgia usually describes a bittersweet feeling about the past, and people may welcome it when an old song, photograph, or familiar smell brings memories back. The word no longer generally signals a disease in the way it did in Hofer’s account.
That change does not mean the earlier suffering was imaginary. It means the word’s everyday meaning broadened: what once named debilitating homesickness came to describe a common emotional response to remembered experience. Nostalgia’s history links a feeling we may seek out for comfort with a form of longing once considered severe enough to make someone physically ill.
