David Lowenthal "Past Time, Present Place: Landscape and Memory"

"Medical respectability spread the disease (of nostalgia) from provincial soldiers and newly transplanted countryfolk to the educated elite. Philippe Pinel limned the symptoms about 1800: 'a sad, melancholy appearance, a bemused look,... an indifference toward everything;... the near impossibility of getting out of bed, and obstinate silence, the rejection of food and drink; emaciation, marasmus and death.' Another physician found that in 'cadavers of patients who had died of this disease..the lungs adhered tight to the pleura of the thorax [and] that the tissue of the  'lobe' was thickened and purulent. Victims of nostalgia in face died because of meningitis, gastroenteritis, and tuberculosis, but because everyone believed nostalgia fatal, it so became. No cure was found. The nineteenth century transformed nostalgia from a geographical disease into a sociological complaint. Its early victims had been countryfolk lost in the anonymity of army or metropolis. Their desire to return was literal, oriented toward closed, familiar environments. As local ties dissolved, nostalgia became a generalized sense of loss, focused less on the locality than on the remembered childhood."

Those O'Connells, O'Connors, O'Callaghans, O'Donoghues--all the Gaels-- were one...with the very landscape itself...To run off the family names was to call to vision certain districts--hills, rivers and plains; while contrariwise, to recollect the place-names in certain regions was to remember the ancient tribes and their memorable  deeds. How different it was with the Planters round about them. For them, all that Gaelic background of myth, literature and history had no existence...The landscape they looked upon was indeed but rocks stones and trees"

Daniel Corkery quoted by Lowenthal