[Homesick in Capricorn's Woods. Remarks on the 300th anniversary of the dissertation on nostalgia and the 700th anniversary of "dolor de dampno"].

Nostalgia (homesickness) was introduced to the domain of medicine only in 1688, but mental suffering corresponding to it was described already in ancient poetry; in Central Europe, it appeared for the first time 700 years ago in the Chronicle of the Zdár monastery, written by Henry the Woodsculptor (= von Heimburg?). In the woodlands between Moravia, Lower Austria and Bohemia, mentioned by Ptolemaios under the Celtic name "Gabreta" (wild goats' wood, cf. Irish "gabrach"), also other behaviour patterns reflecting unusual mental anchorage patterns of the inhabitants appeared between the 13th and 17th centuries. Even if the content of the term "nostalgia" nowadays dissipated to vague "spleen" feelings, its descendant concepts flourish in modern philosophical ("thrownness", "alienation"), psychoanalytical ("existential frustration", "birth trauma," "object loss"), psychiatrical ("agoraphobia", "deprivation", "anaclitic depression") and social psychological ("cataclysmatic fears and anxieties") thought.