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Travel Sickness 187
clear, nonetheless, that travel for one’s health is no invention of
the age of ‘grand tourism’, or spas and sanatoria. Ebenezer
Gilchrist’s The Use of Sea Voyages in Medicine (London,
1756) may have been the first book of its kind in English. It
could, however, have drawn on ancient example.
Not that ancient, though; a chronological change can be
detected. This seems to be a Hellenistic and Roman rather
than a classical Greek theme. (It may even, as Nicholas Purcell
has suggested to me in conversation, have something to do with
the Hellenistic vogue for pleasure boating.) Take Celsus (De
medicina 3.22.8). In cases of true consumption, he says, if the
patient is strong enough, then a long sea voyage, with a change
of air, is called for—ideally the voyage from Italy to Alexandria.
If the patient is not strong enough, he recommends gestatio
(passive exercise while being transported), in a ship not going
very far. If a sea voyage is impossible, the patient should be
carried in a litter. (Compare Celsus 1.10 for the same ‘fallback’
in cases of pestilence.) Pliny asserts in the Natural History
(31.62 ff.) that Egypt is not chosen for its own sake as the
destination of therapeutic voyages but simply because of the
time it takes to get there. Yet the young and ‘consumptive’
Seneca went to Egypt precisely to take the air in the Nile valley
(Letter 78). 35 And Galen admits that many like him returned
from Egypt seemingly cured, only to relapse later through selfindulgence.
36 Mountain air was also highly beneficial to consumptives,
as Cassiodorus reminds us in the sixth century
(Variae 11.10).
Sufferers from other diseases might also be helped by a long
journey. Caelius Aurelianus, the fifth-century North African
physician, recommends travel, preferably by sea, for more ailments
than any other ancient authority—ailments including
bladder problems, diseases of the colon, obesity, epilepsy, and
elephantiasis. For headaches,
make use of natural waters, dry heat, and long sea voyages [longa per
maria navigatio]. Voyages on rivers, bays, and lakes are considered
35 M. Griffin, Seneca (Oxford, 1976), 43.
36 De simplicium medicamentorum temperamentis ac facultatibus 9.1
(12.191K); L. Friedländer, Roman Life and Manners under the Early Empire,
trans. A. B. Gough, 4 (London, 1913), 321.