Dissertatio medica de nostalgia, oder Heimwehe
This is the medical dissertation that named nostalgia. Hofer, a Swiss medical student, coined the word in 1688 from the Greek for homecoming and pain, to describe what he took to be a disease he observed in Swiss mercenaries serving abroad: a longing for home severe enough to produce physical symptoms, wasting and in some accounts death. He classed it as a form of melancholy with an identifiable cause and proposed treatments accordingly. The reason this vault keeps the reference is the history it makes visible. What is now studied as an ordinary bittersweet emotion, and in current research as a mostly beneficial one, entered the record as a diagnosis, moved from medicine into Romantic literature, and only much later became a subject for psychology. This page describes the work from public material, because it is a seventeenth-century Latin dissertation and has no abstract.
This is the medical dissertation that named nostalgia. Hofer, a Swiss medical student, coined the word in 1688 from the Greek for homecoming and pain, to describe what he took to be a disease he observed in Swiss mercenaries serving abroad: a longing for home severe enough to produce physical symptoms, wasting and in some accounts death. He classed it as a form of melancholy with an identifiable cause and proposed treatments accordingly. The reason this vault keeps the reference is the history it makes visible. What is now studied as an ordinary bittersweet emotion, and in current research as a mostly beneficial one, entered the record as a diagnosis, moved from medicine into Romantic literature, and only much later became a subject for psychology. This page describes the work from public material, because it is a seventeenth-century Latin dissertation and has no abstract.
Written from the public account of the work.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
Hofer, J. (1688). Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgia. Basel. Coined the term from nostos and algos.
Where we use it
- Your Nostalgia Is Lying to You, Why We Come Back
Reliability of this reference
The link below is the right work, with one detail that does not line up. Not a journal paper. Link is the e-rara digitised facsimile of the 1688 Basel original, which is the most stable public copy. The e-rara catalogue records the dissertation under the presiding professor Johann Jakob Harder with Hofer as respondent, so the authorship attribution differs from the citation's 'Hofer, J. (1688)' convention. Worth opening before quoting a figure from it.
The source
https://doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-18924
DOI: 10.3931/e-rara-18924