Nostalgia hasn’t all the time been a tool for manipulating our emotions – it was once a medical condition

Nostalgia has somewhat of a nasty repute – particularly for its recent influence on politics and society. The emotion is purported to persuade, delude and charm people into making electoral decisions.

For example, Brexit has been blamed by some on Britain’s “nostalgia for the past”while Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan is probably one of the best encapsulation of nostalgia’s political power.

But, while the politics of nostalgia appear to be particularly potent today, the emotion has an extended, troubled history.

As I actually have explored in my latest book Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotionthere are few feelings as ubiquitous, yet tricky to pin down, as nostalgia. One of the explanations for this is probably because nostalgia, more so than other emotions, has undergone a very radical transformation over the past three centuries. Just 100 years ago or so, it was not merely an emotion – but a sickness.

Nostalgia was first coined as a term – and used as a diagnosis – by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in 1688. Derived from the Greek (homecoming) and (pain), this mysterious disease was a sort of pathological homesickness. In patients, it caused psychological disturbances comparable to lethargy, depression and confusion.

But it also had physical symptoms comparable to heart palpitations, open sores and disturbed sleep. It was regarded as a serious, intractable disease – difficult to treat, almost unattainable to cure. For unlucky victims it could prove fatal, with victims slowly ravenous themselves to death.

Since it was first identified in Switzerland, it was regarded as a peculiarly Swiss condition. The country was so beautiful, its air so refined, that anyone who left was prone to dire physical consequences. Students, mercenaries and domestic servants were supposedly particularly vulnerable – young individuals who had been compelled to go away home and might then find it difficult to return. Nostalgia plagued the Alps but soon spread through Europe – an emotional pandemic, with distinguished peaks in autumn when the falling leaves prompted melancholics to consider the passage of time and their very own mortality.

In 1781, an Ipswich doctor called Robert Hamilton was working in a barracks within the north of England when he encountered a concerning case of nostalgia. A soldier who had recently joined the regiment was sent to see Hamilton by his captain. He had only been a soldier for just a few months, was young, handsome and “well-made for the service”. But “a melancholy hung over his countenance, and wanness preyed on his cheeks.”

The soldier complained of “a universal weakness” – a noise in his ears and a giddiness of his head. He slept poorly and was off his foods and drinks. He sighed deeply and incessantly – something, it seemed, weighed heavy on his mind. All treatments proved ineffective and he was admitted to hospital. He remained bedbound for nearly three months, and have become progressively more emaciated. He was struck down with a fever and spent the nights bathed in sweat. Hamilton expected the worst and thought of him a lost cause.

One morning, a nurse mentioned to Hamilton that the soldier spoke obsessively of home and his friends. The young man had kept up a running commentary on his desire to return home ever since arriving on the hospital. When Hamilton went as much as see the stricken man, he asked him about his native Wales.

The soldier responded with real enthusiasm, became obsessive and wouldn’t stop talking concerning the glories of the Welsh valleys. He asked Hamilton if he would let him go home. The doctor promised that as soon because the soldier’s physical condition had improved, he could return for a six-week break. The patient revived on the very thought. The young soldier, now much recovered, set off to Wales with a spring in his step.

Nostalgia then travelled from Europe via the ships carrying enslaved Africans to North America. At this point, it had not yet acquired the positive association with trivial self-indulgence that it has now. Instead, it had the ability to kill and disable, and was taken very seriously. In fact, it was one among the leading causes of non-combat death throughout the American Civil War. The last recorded victim of nostalgia was a foot solider fighting on the western front in 1917.

In the twentieth century, nostalgia modified. It parted ways with homesickness and transformed – first right into a psychological disorder, then into the emotion we all know today.

However, early psychoanalysts took a dim view of nostalgia and other people vulnerable to its indulgence. They thought they were neurotic, retrograde, overly-sentimental and unable to face reality. Writing within the shadow of the second world war, they were suspicious of patriotism: “Why does an old country, often of wretched and beggarly existence, change into a fairy land to victims of nostalgia?” But these psychoanalysts were also snobbish, believing nostalgia was more common among the many “lower classes” than the cosmopolitan elite.

These views, while now not held by therapists or psychologists, are still prevalent in political discussions about nostalgia. Indeed, nostalgia’s repute today, particularly as an influence on politics, culture and society, is just not so honeyed.

In 2016, for instance, nostalgia was invoked as an evidence for 2 major electoral events: the presidential success of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote. But when journalists and critics used nostalgia to clarify these cataclysmic geopolitical moments, all of them too often deployed it as a sort of diagnosis – something to clarify away seemingly wayward or irrational political decisions. As the historian Robert Saunders put it, in reference to Brexit, the controversy marked out the Leave vote as “a psychological disorder: a pathology to be diagnosed, somewhat than argument with which to have interaction”.

Nostalgia may not be a disease anymore, however it hasn’t shed all of its old associations. It stays, for a lot of, an evidence for what they view because the less progressive, more irrational political decisions some people make.

While now not deadly, it stays a dangerous emotion.