sessed of a homesickness—a desire to be sent
home on furlough or discharged, that
amounted almost to a mania.” One Union
surgeon went even further, claiming that
homesickness “killed as many in our army as
did the bullets of the enemy.”
Concern over homesickness went up the
chain of command in both the Union and
Confederate armies. In his Confederate sur-
geon’s manual, Dr. J. Julian Chisolm said that
in the Army of Northern Virginia when
“homesickness threatened to break out as an
epidemic, an order to erect works was always
hailed with pleasure.” Even if the fortifica-
tions went unused, they were built “simply to
keep the men employed, and make them con-
tented and happy.” In 1863, North Carolina
Governor Zebulon B. Vance wrote President
Jefferson Davis, listing homesickness as one
of “the causes which move our troops to quit
their colors.”
On the Union side, an official of the United
States Sanitary Commission, an organization
that supplemented the U.S. Army’s medical
and relief efforts, said homesickness was “a
great difficulty which our surgeons have to
contend with in their patients. Medicines are
then useless.” The Government Hospital for
the Insane reported that homesickness was
“evident by the character of the morbid men-
tal manifestations exhibited by several of our
army patients.”
Nostalgia was closely related to homesick-
ness. In fact, some writers equated the two.Assistant Surgeon J. Theodore Calhoun wrote
in 1864 that nostalgia was merely the more
professional term. The Surgeon General’s offi-
cial history, The Medical and Surgical History
of the War of the Rebellion,said that home-
sickness occasionally “developed to a morbid
degree and was reported as nostalgia.”
Official figures for nostalgia cases were
not large—5,547 cases, 74 deaths, and 36
discharges through June 1866—making the
malady less prevalent than epilepsy, for
example. However, Assistant Surgeon
Roberts Bartholow said, “These numbers
scarcely express the full extent to which nos-
talgia influenced the sickness and mortality
of the army.” Bartholow, who wrote the sur-
geon general’s manual for soldier enlistment
and discharge, said nostalgia was frequently
fatal and was “a ground for discharge if suf-
ficiently decided and pronounced.” Calhounsaw nostalgia often as a cause of other dis-
ease, or as a “complication to be dreaded as
one of the most serious that could befall the
patient.”
Symptoms attributed to nostalgia varied
from doctor to doctor. Bartholow listed
“weeping, sighing, groaning, and a constant
yearning for home; hallucinations and some-
times maniacal delirium.” Dr. Samuel D.
Gross, a professor of surgery, said nostalgia
was “characterized by a love of solitude, a
vacant, stultified expression of the counte-
nance, a morose, peevish disposition, absence
of mind, pallor of the cheeks; and progressive
emaciation.”
Assistant Surgeon De Witt C. Peters noted
that early symptoms included great mental
dejection, loss of appetite, and indifference to
external influences. These gave way to hys-
terical weeping, throbbing of the temporal
arteries, an anxious expression of the face,
and “watchfulness,” among other symptoms.
Another surgeon referred to “impaired diges-
tion and prostration of nerve-power mani-
fested by languor, tremulousness, palpitations
and obscure cardiac pains.”
Peters said that among young prisoners of
war, nostalgia was the worst complication to
encounter. Anna Holstein, a volunteer nurse,
had experienced the condition with former
prisoners. A Union soldier under her care
became frantic with terror. When asked if the
flags on the walls looked like Rebel flags to
him, the soldier replied, “Oh, no, that looks
like home.”
There was no agreement on how to treat
nostalgia patients. Calhoun recalled his
boarding school days, where ridicule was
wholly relied upon. “The patient can often be
laughed out of it by his comrades, or reasoned
out of it by appeals to his manhood,” wrote
Calhoun, “but of all potent agents, an active
campaign, with its attendant marches, and
more particularly its battles, is the best cura-
tive.” As evidence, he discussed a unit that
lost men daily in camp while adjacent regi-
ments remained healthy. Actively engaged at
the Battle Chancellorsville, however, they
fought nobly, developed a strong esprit de
corps, “and from that day to this, there hasDr. Samuel D. Gross, left, a prominent Northern pro-
fessor of surgery, and Assistant Surgeon De Witt C.
Peters. TOP: A nurse helps a wounded soldier in the
Army of the Potomac write a letter home. Homesick-
ness was epidemic during the war.CWQ-Sum16 Medicine_Layout 1 4/20/16 6:51 PM Page 95