How to Tell If You Have Spring Fever

Author: Sarah Laskow / Source: Atlas Obscura

Are you feeling tired, or energized? Depressed, or cheerful? Ready to go back to bed, or eager to engage with the world? All answers point to the same diagnosis: spring fever.

Over the last 160 years, spring fever has become an “auto-antonym,” or a word with multiple meanings, one of which is the opposite of another.

Back when the phrase first appeared in the U.S. in the 1850s, spring fever meant “the listless feeling caused by the first sudden increase of temperature in spring,” according to one dictionary. The body’s “machinery is clogged,” a writer for the Christian Union wrote in 1878. It wasn’t just a physical ailment, though. The American Agriculturist called spring fever a “feeling of discontent when neither body or mind are at ease.”

By the late 1880s and 1890s, though, Americans’ moralist tendencies were starting to recast this ailment. In 1887, the Therapeutic Gazette sniffed that spring fever was “supposed by many to be moral rather than physical.” A year later, a reader named Josephine wrote to the women’s department of Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine declaring that, “I have decided that I have spring fever. Consequently I don’t propose working very hard.” Common Sense Health Notes described it, in 1893, as “the fever that attacks the boy, causes him to skip school, or shirk work.”

By the early 20th century, spring fever was considered a made-up ailment. “Our grandfathers had much more reverence for spring fever than we have today. In fact they ‘invented’ spring fever,” wrote William Brady, M.D., in a 1916 issue of Illustrated World. The Nurse wrote the next year…

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