A Word, Please: Nostalgia

We treat nostalgia as a sweet, harmless indulgence, a quiet longing for old songs or simpler years. But when a Swiss medical student coined the term in the seventeenth century, it was considered a physical illness so severe that soldiers were forbidden from singing alpine tunes. How a dangerous diagnosis shifted from an ache for a place to an ache for a time reveals what we are really looking for when we glance back.