the.com/homesickness
grief for a place that exists more in memory than on any map.
means The melancholy longing you feel when separated from home and the familiar comforts of family and place.
from A fairly literal compound of "home" plus "sickness" — an English calque of the German "Heimweh" ("home-woe"), which Swiss physicians of the 17th century treated as a genuine medical malady, the same condition they Latinized as "nostalgia" from Greek "nostos" (homecoming) and "algos" (pain). The plainer "homesickness" entered English in the 18th century, trading the doctor's vocabulary for the kitchen-table kind.
- medical term
- called nostalgia, once classified as a deadly disease
- swiss soldiers
- banned from singing a folk tune that triggered it
- physical pain
- can cause real fever, fatigue, and racing heart
- not about place
- often longing for a past self, not geography
- cure attempts
- 17th-century doctors prescribed leeches and opium
for instance
the odyssey — homer's epic poem about odysseus's 10-year journey home to ithaca after the trojan war