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184 Travel Sickness
ation of general medicine known as the Medicina Plinii was
packaged as advice for travellers who would otherwise be at
the mercy of ignorant and expensive quacks. 20 There, it is the
perceived need of self-help that slants the text towards mobility.
But the ninth-century medical handbook of Ibn al-Jazzar entitled,
impartially, Provisions for the Traveller and Nourishment
for the Sedentary, was addressed to physicians. 21 It was for use
in regular consultation, even though its title suggested to Manfred
Ullmann that its overt appeal was to ‘Jedermann’. 22 In the
eleventh century it was translated into Greek by one Constantine
of Reggio, as the Ephodia tou apodemountos, and, in 1124,
into Latin by ‘the’ Constantine—Constantine the African—as
the Viaticum peregrinantis. 23 Both these translations obscured
its titular appeal to the sedentary, however. It passed into the
European medical curriculum of Bologna, Montpellier, and
elsewhere as part of the Articella. 24 That guidance for travellers
could subsume all the basics of medical learning thus in a sense
became very widely accepted. What could the implication of the
title Viaticum have been? That we are all in a literal sense
travellers, all mobile at one stage or another? Or that, in some
higher sense, we are all on the journey, the pilgrimage, of life?
20 Prologue, Plinii Secundi Iunioris qui feruntur de medicina libri tres, ed. A.
Önnerfors, Corpus Medicorum Latinorum 3 (Berlin, 1964), 4.
21 Ibn al-Jazzar on Sexual Diseases and their Treatment: A Critical Edition
of ‘Zad al-musafir wa-qut al-hadir, Provisions for the Traveller and Nourishment
for the Sedentary, Book 6, ed. and trans. G. Bos (London and New York,
1997), 8; M. G. Dugat, ‘Études sur le traité de médecine d’Abou Djàfar
Ah’mad’, Journal Asiatique, 5th ser., 1 (1853), 287–353. Here and in what
follows Arabic is represented in ‘open transliteration’.
22 M. Ullmann, ‘Neues zu den diätetischen Schriften des Rufus von Ephesos’,
Medizinhistorisches Journal 9 (1974), 23–40, at 38.
23 M. F. Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The ‘Viaticum’ and its
Commentaries (Philadelphia, 1990), ch. 2, for bibliography; C. Burnett and
D. Jacquart (eds.), Constantine the African and ‘Ali ibn l-‘Abbas al Magusi:
The ‘Pantegni’ and Related Works, Studies in Ancient Medicine 10 (Leiden,
1996).
24 On the articella, see C. O’Boyle, The Art of Medicine: Medical Teaching
at the University of Paris, 1250–1400 (Leiden, 1998). See also J. Arrizabalaga,
‘The Death of a Medieval Text: The Articella and the Early Press,’ in
R. French, J. Arrizabalaga, A. Cunningham, and L. García-Ballester (eds.)
Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease (Aldershot, 1998), 185–6,
for summary and full bibliography.