Good morning.

Today, a medical school in Basel in 1688… and a word invented for a disease that doctors believed could kill.

Let’s begin.

The Feeling That Could Kill You

Le Mot Juste—“Nostalgia”

Hofer wants a proper medical term, so he builds one from two Greek words. Nostos means homecoming. Algos means pain.

Together they make nostalgia.

In other words, the word that now means a warm glow about the past began as a diagnosis. And Hofer took it very seriously.

He described a young student living far from home who fell so ill that his doctors feared for his life. As soon as he set off for home, his symptoms began to fade, long before he arrived. Hofer’s conclusion was simple: the only cure was to go back.

The disease seemed to strike one group above all. For centuries, Swiss soldiers had fought as hired troops in foreign armies, far from their mountain valleys. Doctors began to report them fainting, feverish, and wasting away from longing.

In 1710, a Basel physician named Theodor Zwinger blamed a particular tune. It was the Kuhreihen, the old song that Alpine herdsmen sang to call their cows. Hearing it, he claimed, made Swiss soldiers weep and desert. It was even said that the French army banned it on pain of death.

Nearly two centuries later, the disease crossed the Atlantic, and a young American illustrator painted it. His name was Winslow Homer, and this was the first painting he ever exhibited.

Winslow Homer, “Home, Sweet Home,” about 1863. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Public domain.

Start in the foreground. Two Union soldiers sit by a smoking fire, in front of a rain-soaked tent. A tin plate holds hard army biscuits.

Now look past them. In the distance, a regimental band is playing, its brass catching the light. The tune is the one in the title.

“Home, Sweet Home” was written in 1823 by the American actor and playwright John Howard Payne, and soldiers on both sides of the Civil War loved it.

Homer showed the picture in New York in the spring of 1863, at the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design. Critics praised its honesty. In 1918, it sold for $350… and in 1997 it entered the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

In that war, the feeling it shows was a real diagnosis. The Union army’s official medical records list 5,213 cases of nostalgia among white soldiers, with 58 deaths, and 334 cases with 16 deaths among Black soldiers. Some officers reportedly stopped their bands from playing “Home, Sweet Home” at all.

By the First World War, the diagnosis had almost vanished. Its suffering was folded into a new term, “shell shock.”

And slowly the word itself changed shape. Hofer’s nostalgia was a longing for a place, and you could cure it with a journey. Ours is a longing for a time, and there is no road back to it.

In 2001, the Russian-American scholar Svetlana Boym drew a useful line through the feeling. Restorative nostalgia, she wrote, wants to rebuild the lost home exactly as it was. Reflective nostalgia lingers on the longing itself, and knows the past cannot return.

I understand the second kind better every year. Not long ago, a stranger passed me in an airport wearing my late father’s aftershave. Suddenly I stood still in the middle of the crowd for a full minute. Going back was never the wish… what I wanted was to stay in that minute a little longer.

If you would like to see Hofer’s original 1688 dissertation, the Wellcome Collection in London has scanned every page: Dissertatio medica de nostalgia →

Hofer believed the only cure was to go home. We still try… with old songs, old photographs, and paintings of two soldiers listening to a band.

Three Things Worth Knowing

Curious & Controversial

Connoisseur’s Diary

Worth Seeing

Homer’s small painting is only about 55 centimetres tall. Seeing it in person, you notice how little he dramatised the scene, and how much of the feeling lives in the distance between the soldiers and the band.

Where: National Gallery of Art, West Building, Washington, D.C., listed in Gallery 68.  Tickets: free; the National Gallery charges no admission.  Insider tip: Paintings move for loans and rehangs, so check the artwork page for its current location before you go.  Home, Sweet Home at nga.gov →

Worth Reading

The Future of Nostalgia — Svetlana Boym (2001). A Harvard scholar who grew up in Soviet Leningrad explores how cities, nations and exiles remember. It is where the “restorative” and “reflective” kinds come from.

Explore Further

Browse: Hofer’s 1688 dissertation →, digitised by the Wellcome Collection.

Read: Homesick for the Mountains →, the Swiss National Museum on the Kuhreihen and the “Swiss disease.”

Tonight’s Quiz

1. What do the Greek roots of “nostalgia” mean?

A) Old age and memory

B) Homecoming and pain

C) Night and sorrow

D) Song and longing

2. Who painted Home, Sweet Home in about 1863?

A) Thomas Eakins

B) John Singer Sargent

C) Winslow Homer

D) James McNeill Whistler

3. In Proust’s novel, what does the narrator dip into his tea?

A) A croissant

B) A madeleine

C) A macaron

D) A slice of brioche

If the links above don’t respond in your email app, just reply with your answers—I’ll write back.

A word invented to name a deadly illness now sells records, films and old-fashioned sweets. Nostalgia never went away. It just stopped being something we wanted cured.

Tomorrow is Friday… we gather up the week, from a giant bronze spider to a raven on a bust of Pallas, and add one new way of looking at all of them.

In good taste,
Charles T. Mayfair

Editor, Connoisseur Daily