Illustration: Polly Becker

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) entered the American Psychiatric Association’s manual of diagnoses in 1980, five years after the Vietnam War ended. A Boston College historian, Thomas Dodman, who studies war and the emotions of soldiers in the late 1700s and 1800s, says military doctors of the day identified their own version of PTSD—they called it “nostalgia,” which they initially considered a form of homesickness linked to physical and behaviorial problems but ultimately associated with troubling conduct among returning veterans.

Soon after arriving at the University of Chicago for Ph.D. studies in 2003, Dodman stumbled upon a book called The Future of Nostalgia (2001), by the late Harvard professor Svetlana Boym. Piquing his curiosity was a passing reference to French soldiers in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars suffering from a debilitating nostalgia. On a research trip to the French military’s medical archives housed in Val-de-Grâce Hospital in Paris, the British-born doctoral student, now an assistant professor, riffled through reports and death certificates issued for soldiers in those wars. “Nostalgia,” according to a contemporary source, accounted for five percent of fatalities across some regiments.

“It was one of those moments every historian dreams of,” recalls Dodman, referring to the chance archival find. The medical reports of fatal nostalgia had been largely lost to history until then.

Today, Dodman roams a relatively new subfield known as “the history of emotions.” He doesn’t wear the historian-of-emotions label, though. Dodman prefers to see his work as “social and intellectual history that doesn’t leave emotions out.” According to Dodman, many historians view the emotions as “very problematic”—scholars would rather verify events and phenomena with precision. “You simply can’t do that with emotions,” he says. Dodman consults other disciplines such as anthropology and psychoanalysis. The “father of French psychiatry,” Philippe Pinel (1745–1826), he notes, recommended a “rudimentary talking cure” for nostalgia.

Dodman’s book, What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion, 1688–1884, is to be issued by the University of Chicago Press in the spring of 2017. Its focus will include French soldiers and military physicians during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800s and the French colonization of North Africa in the latter part of the century.

In an article titled “1814 and the Melancholy of War” published this year in the Journal of Military History, Dodman probes what he calls “the inner life of defeat.” He cites French medical authorities who, during the final throes of the Napoleonic Wars, raised alarms over outbreaks of “sadness, discouragement, and nostalgia” in the ranks. At the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in March 1814, between 50 and 100 conscripts of the French army in retreat died each day—”almost all due to mal du pays,” according to a diarist who favored the vernacular expression for nostalgie. Doctors, whose understanding of psychological and physical disorders was fluid, blamed the melancholy moods for the spread of typhus and tuberculosis, as well as for erratic behavior and suicide.

After the wars, ex-soldiers wrote in letters and diaries about night terrors and flashbacks that included visions of severed limbs. Dodman notes the “uncanny resemblances” between these accounts and those of Vietnam War veterans diagnosed with PTSD. “On a symptom[atic] level, there is little to distinguish one clinical picture from the other,” he writes, though the “idea of psychological trauma . . . would only be invented” in the late 1800s. The historian adds that the medical discourse on nostalgia represented “the first clinical attempt to grapple with functional war neuroses.”

To the French regimes that followed 1814, army veterans were just “an eerie reminder of a past officially erased from the history books,” says Dodman—they were a “lost generation,” depicted by Balzac, for example, as “drifters.” Many were impoverished, because only 130,000 (28 percent) of the returning soldiers qualified for pensions as either invalids or 30-year veterans. “Surely enough,” writes Dodman, “some came to idealize the camaraderie, adventure, and sense of purpose they had tasted in the army.”

In his next project, Dodman will examine 244 letters penned by a young man who volunteered to fight for the French Revolution in 1792. The historian tracked the cache to an attic in a remote village in Provence, where an elderly descendant of the soldier lives. Dodman will spend the coming year dissecting the letters and other sources as a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Read more by William Bole