Sign up for the Mini Philosophy newsletter A place to pause and reflect on life’s bigger questions, with Big Think’s Jonny Thomson. These days, we often consider nostalgia to be a complicated but mostly harmless emotion. It’s full of pathos but, like heartache, it’s something you live with or get over. But it has not always been thus. From the late 17th through the late 19th centuries, nostalgia was mostly viewed as a legitimate medical condition. Doctors argued that it was a physical ailment because they did not yet share the modern, sharp distinction between the mind and the body. Emotions were seen as “the passions” that could directly deplete a person’s physical “animal spirits” and vital reserves. Their arguments were underlined by a series of seemingly physical symptoms linked to nostalgic sentiments. When people pined for some past time or some distant homeland, they reported lethargy, fever, and heart palpitations. Some died from starvation, as their nostalgia reached such a peak that they turned from the present entirely. In her book, Nostalgia: A History …