Christmas is about giving . . . in to nostalgia: deep-rooted, therapeutic, and first medically diagnosed among 17th-century Swiss mercenaries fighting abroad who became chronically, and in some cases fatally, homesick.
The bestseller lists are dominated by spoof versions of the Ladybird books, recalling (while mocking) a simpler, sweeter, sentimental past. With every Christmas card we write, every stuffed turkey, every repeat of Dad’s Army, every homecoming, we are harking back to a time and a place in memory with happy associations, an idealised childhood, partly mythical and deeply commercialised, but profoundly and universally felt.
Nostalgia often gets a bad press. The playwright Dennis Potter called it a “second-order emotion”. George Orwell mocked the British tendency to denigrate the present in comparison with the past: “Before the war, and especially before the Boer war, it was summer all the year round.”
Nostalgia for some imagined better era is as old as time. Archaeologists recently uncovered an 8,500-year-old cult in Cyprus that had apparently rejected the Anatolian world, and sought to return to an earlier time before the invention of such new-fangled innovations as pottery. In 700BC the Greek poet Hesiod was already lamenting the passing of a golden age.
But nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Once considered a serious medical ailment, nostalgia is now regarded by most psychologists as a positive emotion improving mood, social interactions and self-confidence, while reducing existential angst. Nostalgia turns out to be good for you.
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Greek soldiers serving in the Trojan war suffered from homesickness, but as a medical complaint nostalgia is 328 years old. A compound of the Greek “nostos”, a Homeric word meaning homecoming or return, and “algos”, meaning pain or ache, the term was invented by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss doctor, who identified a particular sort of melancholy among Swiss mercenaries fighting in France and Italy.
In a dissertation published in 1688, Hofer wrote: “It began with the soldiers being distracted by thoughts of home . . . then it would progress to lethargy and sadness, frequent sighs and disturbed sleep . . . some soldiers died of the illness, wasting away from refusal to eat.” Others went Awol, but were captured and then executed. Rousseau wrote that the Swiss fighters were ordered not to play the traditional horn melody, the Kuhreihen, on pain of severe punishment, since these were thought to induce “an almost irrepressible yearning for home”.
Medical opinion was divided over the cause of nostalgia, also known as “the Swiss illness”. One military physician diagnosed a form of brain damage caused by the constant clanging of cow bells in the Swiss pastures. Others attempted to locate a specific nostalgic bone that might be surgically removed. Symptoms included shortness of breath, fever, dysentery, weeping and “stupidity of mind”. Untreated, sufferers of acute nostalgia were expected to die.
Sir Joseph Banks, the ship’s doctor on Captain Cook’s first voyage, noted the homesickness among the crew of HMS Endeavour: “The sailors were now pretty far gone with the longing for home which the physicians have gone so far as to esteem a disease under the name of nostalgia.”
“Recent studies have shown that people prone to nostalgia are better at coping with stress
During the American Civil War, soldiers uprooted from their homes were often believed to be suffering from nostalgia, and sometimes discharged as a result. By the end of the conflict, some 5,000 soldiers had been diagnosed with nostalgia, and 74 had died from it.
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Around the start of the 20th century, attitudes towards nostalgia began to change. The term vanished as a distinct medical category. A longing for home, and the memories evoked by the past, were no longer seen as detrimental to mental wellbeing. The death records for the First World War list only one soldier thought to have died of nostalgia.
Today, to become “nostalgic”, is to be pleasantly reminded of the past, often triggered by a person or event, a passage of music or a taste. Recent studies have shown that people prone to nostalgia are better at coping with stress. An ailment once known as “hypochondria of the heart” has been found to be literally heart-warming: thinking about the past fondly, and particularly about a specific location, actually increases perceptions of physical warmth.
The evolution of nostalgia, from a potentially lethal medical condition to a beneficial psychological habit, is partly the result of technological change, and a mobile world in which remaining at home for a lifetime is the exception, not the norm.
The 17th-century mercenaries and Civil War soldiers could not go home, or even see it. But the soldiers of the First World War were able to return to London for the weekend, and be back in the trenches by Monday morning. If Captain Cook and his crew had had access to Skype or FaceTime then the mood aboard HMS Endeavour would have been much chirpier. Cheap air travel and the internet have killed off nostalgia-as-illness, and replaced it with nostalgia-as-therapy.
In 1688, Hofer noted the case of a young student from Berne who had moved to Basel and come down with a raging dose of nostalgia. After six months away from home, he was “half dead”, but the moment he started the 60-mile journey back to Berne he was able “to draw breath more freely [and] show a better tranquillity of mind”.
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So when you deck the halls, evoke the nostalgia of Christmases past, and brave the traffic jams to gather with your family, you are actually improving your psychological health, sharing 300-year-old symptoms with Swiss mercenaries wistful for the sound of cowbells, and implementing the only known cure for homesickness: going home.