NOSTALGIA. 215 



out-cloor sports of her brothers. There is a resolute shutting out of 

 every thing like a noisy romp ; the active games and all happy, bois- 

 terous plays, by field or roadside, are not proper to her ! She is cased 

 in a cramping dress, so heavy and inconvenient that no boy could 

 wear it for a day without falling into gloomy views of life. All this 

 martyrdom to propriety and fashion tells upon strength and sym- 

 metry, and the girl reaches womanhood a wreck. That she reaches it 

 at all, under these suffering and bleached-out conditions, is due to her 

 superior elasticity to resist a method of education which would have 

 killed off all the boys years before. . . . There are abundant statistics 

 to prove that hard study is the discipline arid tonic most girls need to 

 supplant the too great sentimentality and useless day-dreams fostered 

 by fashionable idleness, and provocative of ' nerves,' melancholy, and 

 inanition generally, and, so far as statistics can, that the women-gradu- 

 ates of these colleges make as healthy and happy wives and mothers 

 as though they had never solved a mathematical problem, nor trans- 

 lated Aristotle." — Fortnightly Beview. 



NOSTALGIA. 



By FEENAND PAPILLON. 

 translated by a. e. macdonough. 



THOSE great changes of place, temporarily, by masses of people, 

 which were brought about by the late war, have drawn the at- 

 tention of physicians again to a very singular malady, nostalgia, or 

 homesickness, some extremely noteworthy cases of which appeared, 

 particularly among the mohiles collected at Paris during the siege. 

 Indeed, homesickness is a real disease, occasioning a group of symp- 

 toms and disturbances of very definite character — a disease the more 

 real, inasmuch as it often ends in death. An eminent physician, who 

 had earlier opportunities as a health-officer in the navy, and lately 

 again as chief of one of the great Paris ambulances, to study nostalgia 

 very closely. Dr. Benoist de la Grandiere, has published an essay on 

 the subject which will give us some interesting facts. 



Sauvage describes nostalgia by four words — morositas, permgilio, 

 anorexia, asthenia — which signify sadness, sleeplessness, want of ap- 

 petite, and exhaustion. The patient very early loses his cheerfulness 

 and vigor, and courts in solitude a surrender to the fixed idea that 

 haunts him, the thought of his country. He dwells in charmed repe- 

 tition upon the memories connected with the places where his early 

 life was spent, and paints them with a world of dreams in which his 

 imagination shuts itself so obstinately that nothing can call him away 



