Tag: nostalgia
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Musical evenings on HMS Bounty
Stewart JustmanMissoula, Montana, United States Dispatched to Tahiti in 1787 to gather breadfruit trees to be transplanted to the West Indies, HMS Bounty was a small ship with every possible inch allotted to botanical cargo. Spare too was the crew, which included no marines who might have acted as Lieutenant William Bligh’s bodyguards in the…
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Remembrance of things past
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom In these troubled times imposed by Covid-19, much attention has been paid to depression, stress, and complaints of enforced isolation and of longing for the old days—the “normal times.” In this and in other contexts, nostalgia is regarded as a normal sentiment with no implication of disease or illness. But…
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“Uncertain disease”: The science of nostalgia
Kevis GoodmanBerkeley, California, USA William Cullen, the well-esteemed Edinburgh physician and professor of medicine at Glasgow and later Edinburgh, shared the “love of system” praised by no less than Adam Smith, who—not coincidentally—happened to be Cullen’s patient and friend.1 Cullen set out to gather all existing medical nosologies (the disease classifications that imitated Linnaean botanical…