Managing Memories: Treating and Controlling Homesickness during the Civil War

Although it has disappeared as a clinical diagnosis, a Disability Studies perspective on Civil War nostalgia offers an opportunity to recover the process by which understanding around a medical event occurs. By incorporating and examining the interplay between and among participants in the conversation surrounding nostalgia as they operate within various site specific temporal and social contexts, this method of analysis offers an opportunity to arrive at an understanding not only of the factors that contribute to different perspectives on an illness, but also into how some voices become ascendant in constructing medical understanding and why others become subordinate, dismissed, or disappear.