Cross channel infections: nostalgia, spleen and the construction of national character.
In the nineteenth century, both spleen and nostalgia were considered clinical categories, and each associated with the character of a nation. English medical commentators boasted of their compatriots' resistance to nostalgia, an often fatal form of homesickness, while the French in turn argued that the splenetic English were flocking to France to escape their own insalubrious climate. Behind such jingoistic claims were broader concerns, on both sides of the channel but particularly acute for the French, about the impact of modernity on subjectivity, the relation between home, homeland and empire, and the fitness of both nations to succeed in the modern age.
Science Museum, South Kensington, London, United Kingdom. lisa.osullivan@sciencemuseum.org.uk
Lisa
L
O'Sullivan
D004739:England; D005602:France; D049672:History, 19th Century; D006801:Humans; D008132:Loneliness; D012933:Social Identification; D013694:Temperament