You're having endless sleepless nights, you're suffering from an upset stomach, your head feels like it's about to explode and you cry over the slightest thing. Actually, the only thing you want to do is to go home. That's how it feels for a lot of people - homesickness. This summer, Radio Netherlands Worldwide is exploring the theme of 'homesickness'. This article, the last in the series, looks at the historical roots of homesickness.

Homesickness was once taken much more seriously. In fact, it was regarded as a deadly disease. A search for the roots of that attitude inevitably leads us to Switzerland, a country which seems to have the medical patent on homesickness.
 

Potentially fatal
In the university library in Basel, for instance, you can find a slim volume dating from 1688 and entitled Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgica oder Heimwehe - a rather odd combination of Latin and German which translates as "A Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia or Homesickness". This book by Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer provides the first ever scientific description of being homesick as a sickness and one with potentially fatal results.

Librarian Dominique Hunger explains Dr Hofer's theory.
“It's about a distorted view of home caused by leaving it behind. Just as animals removed from the herd can die, human beings can suffer a persistent desire to find their way back home. This causes mental anguish, for which there is no cure except for the patient to return home immediately.”

Taste of milk
The concept of homesickness as a deadly disease prevailed in medical circles for some time. However, there was a shift of emphasis. It was no longer caused simply by thinking about home, it was seen as the result of environmental factors: the difference in air pressure or the change in the taste of milk.

Since leaving the country made you sick and returning cured you, Swiss mountain air was believed to have restorative properties. In the nineteenth century this produced a new industry: the health resort. From far and wide, sick people and hypochondriacs descended on the Swiss Alps to “take a cure”.

Noxious fumes
Scott Brand, who worked on an exhibition in Zurich about Switzerland as the health resort nation, cites the famous children's books about the Swiss girl Heidi in which the city is portrayed as making people unhappy and ill, unlike the healthy life in the countryside.
“Homesickness is linked with the cliché of healthy Swiss mountain air and its distance from modern industrial cities and their noxious fumes.”

Swiss country girl Heidi is forced to move to the big city Frankfurt, where she becomes ill with homesickness. In the tradition of Johannes Hofer, a doctor prescribes an immediate return home. And, of course, she recovers immediately. Her little friend Clara can even throw her wheelchair away, since the Swiss air and cow's milk have completely cured her.

An Alpine miracle.