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Travel Sickness 185
The latter reading, perhaps implicit in medieval medicine, was
to be made explicit in a Renaissance regimen to which I shall
return at the end.
Against all this, on the other hand, are ranged what might be
called the medical forces of ‘fixity’: those who image a static
world to us. 25 This is the second of the contradictory tendencies
to which I referred. Take the two corpora that came to dominate
the medical output of antiquity and that thus moulded the
medical learning of both Europe and the Middle East until at
least 1700 (if not much later in some places). These are the
Hippocratic corpus and the massive output of Galen. In the
most significant of the earlier Hippocratic texts such as Airs,
waters, places or Epidemics I and III, it is the healer who is on
the move. Patients—my earlier quotation from the Hippocratic
Regimen notwithstanding—are envisaged as closely related to
their environments, which change with the seasons but are
geographically stable. 26 Patients take exercises, ponoi, but they
do not ‘travel’. When the Hippocratic texts describe the questions
that the physician should put to the patient (for example at
the beginning of the treatise on Prognosis or in Epidemics 1.3.10)
they do not juxtapose ‘where have you been?’ with ‘where does
it hurt?’. (For something approaching an enquiry of that sort we
have to wait until Roman times (c.100 ad and Rufus of Ephesus,
who also composed a regimen for travellers.) 27
Galen is much the same as his Hippocratic exemplars. 28 In
De sanitate tuenda, books 2–3, he writes at some length about
the different ages of life, about exercise (including the longdistance
exercise of riding and hunting) and fatigue. 29 But apart
from a few stray asides he has virtually nothing else explicitly
25 N. Purcell, ‘Fixity’, in R. Schlesier and U. Zellmann (eds.), Mobility and
Travel in the Mediterranean from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Münster,
2004), 73–83.
26 e.g. Epidemics, 1.1–5.
27 Rufus von Ephesos, Die Fragen des Arztes an den Kranken, ed. H. Gärtner,
CMG, Suppl. 4 (Berlin, 1962).
28 V. Nutton, ‘Galen and the Traveller’s Fare’, in J. Wilkins, D. Harris,
and M. Dobson (eds.), Food in Antiquity (Exeter, 1995), 359–70, is far more
about Galen’s dietetics in general than its title suggests.
29 R. M. Green, A Translation of Galen’s Hygiene (Springfield, Ill., 1951);
6.1–452K, CMG 5.4.2. For analysis, see G. Wöhrle, Studien zur Theorie der
Antiken Gesundheitslehre, Hermes Einzelschriften 56 (1990), ch. 7.