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Travel Sickness 183
is the highway, and the culmination of the disease his
destination’. 16
Beyond these generalities two contradictory tendencies are
evident in the medical literature. On one hand, everyone is
mobile. That is, the possibility of considerable movement is
mentioned at the outset and presupposed in all the medical
advice that follows. In the fourth century ad, the imperial
physician Oribasius prefaced the advice on food that begins
his massive Medical Collections (1.1) with the reminder that,
‘on arrival in a foreign country one is obliged to eat something
unusual’, and one should test the food in advance (as well, other
ancient authors recommended, as eating lots of garlic). 17 Movement
is also presupposed in the institutional and social obverse
of this regimen for the well to do. The late antique hospital,
which was developing in Byzantium around the time Oribasius
was writing, is a xenodocheion. It offers rest, nursing, and,
sometimes, medicine—to xenoi, strangers: to the rootless poor,
those who move to survive because they have no personal support
networks. 18 At the extreme, the regimen of the mobile and
that of the rooted are represented as almost identical. After all,
as far as much dietary advice is concerned, where you are makes
little difference. As Anthimus wrote in De obseruatione ciborum
to Theuderic, a sixth-century king of the Franks: ‘let us suppose
that someone asks how anyone can take this sort of care [over
food] when engaged in military manoeuvres or a long journey. I
would say that if a fire can be lit . . . what has been suggested
ought to be possible.’ 19 The early medieval European compil-
16
A. Z. Iskandar, A Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts on Medicine and
Science in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library (London, 1967), 4.
17
Trans. M. Grant, Dieting for an Emperor (Leiden, 1997), 26–7, and see
also 100.
18
For the hospital see now P. Brown, Poverty and Leadership in the Later
Roman Empire (Hanover and London, 2002), 33–44; P. Horden, ‘The Earliest
Hospitals in Byzantium, Western Europe and Islam’, Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, forthcoming. On networks of support, P. Horden, ‘Household
Care and Informal Networks: Comparisons and Continuities from Antiquity
to the Present’, in P. Horden and R. Smith (eds.), The Locus of Care: Families,
Communities, Institutions and the Provision of Welfare since Antiquity (London
and New York, 1998), 21–67.
19
Anthimus, De obseruatione ciborum, On the Observance of Foods, ed. and
trans. M. Grant (Totnes, 1996), 48–9.