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Travel Sickness 181
suffering required of the pilgrim or the shipwreck risked by the
voyager. 10 They offer a more positive view of personal mobility.
They also bring together two poor relations. Migration is the
most neglected aspect of pre-modern demography. 11 Regimen—preventive
medicine, diet—is the most neglected aspect
of pre-modern medicine, mainly, I conjecture, because medical
historians are still subconsciously in thrall to the therapeutic,
interventionist, bias of modern biomedicine. 12
2. mobility and fixity
Before I consider those two themes separately, let me next try to
generalize about the perceptions of Mediterranean movement
that the medical texts offer. I must warn in advance that no big
demographic conclusions will emerge. It is not inevitable that
mobility should engender a commensurate literature of advice.
That is, the medical literature cannot, through any changes in
emphasis or quantity, give us a reliable index of changing
Mediterranean mobility. Still less is this evidence sufficiently
detailed or geographically widespread to permit Mediterranean
and non-Mediterranean comparisons—comparisons that might
suggest where mobility was greater. What the medical material
can do, however, is show how at least some contemporary
authors perceived, classified, and evaluated mobility.
In the late fifth to early fourth century bc the author of the
Hippocratic Regimen (Peri diaites) claims (ch. 68) to be writing
for the majority of men: those who use ordinary, accessible,
food and drink, who exert themselves as much as is essential,
who undertake land journeys and sea voyages to collect their
10 D. J. Birch, Pilgrimage to Rome in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, Suffolk,
1998), 3–4, on the ‘white martyrdom’ of pilgrimage, contrasted, but not too
strongly, with the ‘red martyrdom’ of death. See further C. Stancliffe, ‘Red,
White and Blue Martyrdom’, in D. Whitelock, R. McKitterick, and
D. Dumville (eds.), Ireland in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1982),
21–46. For the overrated dangers of Mediterranean sea voyages see CS, chs.
V.3, X.4, with bibliography.
11 CS, Bibliographical Essay to ch. IX.6.
12 P. Horden, ‘Religion as Medicine: Music in Medieval Hospitals’, in
P. Biller and J. Ziegler (eds.), Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages
(Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochester, NY, 2001), 135–53.