Johannes Hofer, a German physician, coined the term in 1678 when he found these symptoms highly developed among Swiss mountaineers removed to the lowlands. Well into the nineteenth century, Switzerland "continued to be recognized by all as the classic land of nostalgia," according to a survey of the medical literature; but the list of sufferers was gradually broadened to include students, soldiers, and domestic servants, groups uprooted from home and exposed to a type of suffering often likened to lovesickness. Psychological disorders were added to the list of symptoms; an 1879 treatise spoke of "ennui, eventually giving way to profound melancholia; an unnatural reserve and silence; complete indifference to the immediate surroundings; vague feelings of unrest; ... tears; ... an overwhelming desire to return home." Some authorities attributed to the Celts, as well as to the Swiss, an unusual propensity to nostalgia; the English, on the other hand, were judged too cosmopolitan to suffer in this way from residence away from home. In general, nostalgia appeared to be an affliction of naive, unsophisticated, unlettered peoples, and a few doctors argued for universal education as the only effective means of prevention.

Just when "nostalgia" lost its medical associations and came to refer to a sentimental view of the past is difficult to determine, but the new and broader usage was firmly established by the I920s. The writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, to cite only one of the more obvious sources, indicate that the feelings formerly associated with pastoralism, the celebration of the American West, and the myth of the small town were now assimilated quite self-consciously to the phenomenon of nostalgia. Fitzgerald refers to the hour of seven o'clock, the "soft and romantic time before supper," as a "nostalgic hour." Several times he mentions his "vast nostalgia," as a boy growing up in St. Paul, for the East, calling it the "country of my nostalgia." These passages, which identify nostalgia with the promise of romantic excitement, might seem to evoke expectation more than regret, except that Fitzgerald clearly believed—and this belief provides a recurrent theme, indeed the central theme in his work—that experience seldom lives up to its promise, that happiness never lasts, and that repeated disillusionments eventually erode the capacity for wonder (most movingly described in the closing pages of The Great Gatsby) and lead to "emotional bankruptcy." Fitzgerald's view of nostalgia is far from simple, and I can hardly do justice to it here, but it is enough for our present purposes

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