Basel, Switzerland, 1688. A young medical student examining behavioral symptoms among a group of mercenaries, who had been waging battles in faraway lands in the names of various European leaders, identifies a wide range of emotional expressions: depression, despair, bouts of crying, anorexia, and attempted suicide. This future physician, Johannes Hofer, concludes that the mercenaries are suffering from nostalgia, intense homesickness, and sees the phenomenon as a symptom of damage to the midbrain, motivated by swelling memories of the homeland (Hofer [1688] 1934). According to global clinical literature, during the American Civil War (1861–1865), soldiers who were reclusive and kept to themselves, sitting, staring, and appearing morose, were diagnosed as “nostalgic” (Levy 1992). It was only around the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century that nostalgia was no longer being defined as a form of brain damage but rather as a psychiatric or psychosomatic disorder (Batcho 1998). The association of pain and longing, as indicated by the history of the term, thus solidifies the understanding that war, trauma, and nostalgia are intertwined.