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When Nostalgia Was Deadly

was first named in 17th-century Switzerland, nostalgia was a very real – and very dangerous – disease. In 1688 a young Swiss milkmaid clambered over a rocky outcrop.

Having first identified the disorder among Swiss mercenary soldiers, Hofer was moved by the stories of afflicted youths who (unless rapidly returned to their native land) ‘met their last days on foreign shores’, and devoted his studies to their mysterious ailment, which he called la maladie du pays. As he saw it, nostalgia was a kind of pathological patriotic love, an intense and dangerous homesickness (or das Heimweh in Hofer’s native German). One German doctor even blamed the famed Alpine air, suggesting that the Swiss were so acclimatised to their home atmosphere that it made them unable to breathe properly in other places.

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