In a chapter from his Echoes of the Civil War As I Hear Them (1905), entitled “The Humor of Field and Camp,” Wisconsin officer Michael Hendrick Fitch recalled an amusing caper involving William Cumback, a representative from Indiana, who “told a good joke on himself as well as his wife, regarding this word, ‘Nostalgia.’” While visiting regiments from his home state, an officer informed Cumback that several soldiers were afflicted with a sometime-deadly disease known as nostalgia. Entirely mystified by this seemingly pervasive ailment, Cumback sought counsel from a regimental surgeon who clued-in the baffled politician as to medical terminology. Spotting an opportunity ripe for mischief-making, Cumback wrote his wife to note that “a great many”