Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/230

218. During the late war, nostalgia found quite a number of victims among the soldiers of the Landwehr; and, on a late journey to Alsatia, I satisfied myself that it affected the soldiers from Silesia and Pomerania.

Sagar says that love of country is strongest with those who are nearest to a state of nature. This is quite correct. Savages, men living under the rudest forms of civilization, in the most uninviting climates, grieve when they quit them. Foissar relates that a Lapp, brought to Poland, where every kindness was shown him, was seized with incurable sadness, and at last escaped and returned to his inhospitable country. Greenlanders who had been taken across to Denmark, risked certain death by trusting themselves to slight canoes to cross the ocean separating them from their own land. Similar facts have been observed among the North American Indians. Albert mentions the story of a young squaw, Couramé, a foundling in the forest, adopted by a rich family. "Take me back," she exclaimed, "take me back to the land where I was born. O mother! have you quite forgotten me?" Couramé fell ill, and wasted away. One day, falling in with some Indians of her tribe, she made her escape with them. Strange affinity! that unconquerable attachment of man to the soil, the climate, the aspect of the narrow-bounded region in which his childhood had been spent! What an argument to oppose to our international and humanitarian philosophers!

What, then, is this strange disease? Most physicians class it as a variety, one form, of insanity, a sort of mania or melancholy. Benoist de la Grandière does not so regard it; he discovers in it a nervous affection of the organs through which imagination and memory act. The very clear distinctions which he points out between nostalgia and other kinds of mental derangement justify his way of viewing it. Indeed, the nostalgic patient has no such senseless or extravagant notions as madmen have. He never fancies himself possessed of a devil, or changed to a wolf or a dog. He is not swayed, as are the melancholy-mad, by the dread or terror of some imagined ill. On the other hand, the subjects of mania, or hypochondria, are usually in good health; in spite of their deranged intellects, they retain their strength and good condition. The deep sadness of the nostalgic patient, on the contrary, produces its first effect by changing the functions of nutrition in him, and causing disturbances that are often fatal to life. The various conditions of insanity are hereditary, while nostalgia never is so. Besides, the especial characteristic of this disorder is that it may be cured with absolute certainty, when the troubles it has brought about have not yet endangered the health; restoring the patient to his family effects a complete cure. On the contrary, the attempt to satisfy an ambitious madman's dreams of greatness or of wealth, far from lessening his mental derangement, will only give it new violence.