Nostalgia & War (Civil War Psychiatry)

Nostalgia & War (Civil War Psychiatry)

Year: 1863

"By and by the way Have you ever heard the words I'm singing in these songs? It's for the girl I've loved all along" -Smashing Pumpkins (Muzzle) ---- Anderson, Donald Lee, and Godfrey Tryggve Anderson. "Nostalgia and Malingering in the Military during the Civil War." Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 28.1 (1984): 156-166. [ "The American Civil War witnessed a revival of nostalgia, a mental disorder that had created problems for armies for centuries. It is not within the scope of this study to trace the origins of nostalgia in detail. If we were to attempt this we might begin in early biblical times and consider the words of the psalmist: "By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion" [I]. As early as 1569, a Swiss officer reported that one of his cadets had succumbed to homesickness. References to this problem can also be found in the first half of the seventeenth century. In 1688 Johannes Hofer, a medical student in Germany, wrote a dissertation on the subject. He was the first to use the term "nostalgia" and to identify it as a disease. He described the symptoms as anorexia, insomnia, slow fever, irritability, anxiety, and a general wastin