When homesickness became a medical diagnosis
In 1688, Swiss physician Johannes Hofer gave a name to a severe form of homesickness: nostalgia, combining Greek words for “return” and “pain.” He was describing people—especially Swiss soldiers serving far from home—whose longing seemed to bring physical illness as well as sadness. Reports associated it with problems such as sleeplessness, loss of appetite, and fever.
That diagnosis reflected a period when physicians often understood emotional distress through the body. Nostalgia was not simply a poetic way to say someone missed home; it could be treated as a dangerous condition that impaired a soldier’s ability to serve.
The most direct remedy was to go home
For a soldier whose illness was believed to stem from separation, the most effective treatment was to end that separation: send him back to his native place and family. In a military setting, that meant nostalgia could become a practical problem for commanders, not just a private feeling. Keeping an ill soldier abroad might prolong the condition; allowing him to return could restore him.
Physicians could also use the medical treatments common in their era to address symptoms or presumed bodily imbalance. But these remedies were secondary to the diagnosis’s central logic: if distance from home caused the suffering, restoring the patient to home offered the clearest cure. A feeling now usually treated as ordinary emotion could, in the 17th century, help determine whether a soldier stayed at the front or was sent back across the mountains.
