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Travel Sickness 189
charmes our senses with such unspeakable and sweet variety’,
and would of course urge it on melancholics; and Sydenham
once reportedly cured a patient by sending him on a journey to
see a non-existent physician in Aberdeen. 41 ‘Dr Horse’, as he
became known, is the commonest recommendation. Sailing is
rare; long sea voyages rarer still. In general, medieval doctors’
regimens and consilia have little to offer on the theme of ‘gestation’
other than a few brief topoi. 42
Between antiquity and the Middle Ages, the categories of
personal mobility changed as well. That is a huge theme.
Here, I simply want to stress the value of the medical evidence
as an indicator of the sometimes alien ways in which the varieties
of movement in space were conceptualized. Many of the
texts I have been citing, and a number of others (for instance
Book 2 of Galen’s De sanitate tuenda), discuss different forms
of exercise. And these discussions have obvious implications
for the classification of more extensive movement. In the Hippocratic
Regimen (chs. 2, 61) ponoi are either natural (kata
phusin) or violent (dia bies). Perhaps to our surprise, natural
exercises are those of sight, hearing, voice, and thought.
Walking partakes of both the natural and the violent. We have
seen different, but equally unfamiliar, taxonomies of movement
in Celsus and Caelius. For those who could not afford to hunt,
Galen recommended playing with a small ball, hardly the obvious
alternative. 43 In the medieval learned tradition, physical
41 Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. II, sect. ii, memb. 3, subs. 1, ed. T. C.
Faulkner, N. K. Kiessling, and R. L. Blair 2 (Oxford, 1990), 65.
K. Dewhurst, Dr. Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689): His Life and Original
Writings (London, 1966), 53–4 (a story not told until the nineteenth century,
and of other physicians, such as John Abernethy, as well; I am grateful to
Alick Cameron and John Forrester for references).
42 P. Gil-Sotres, ‘The Regimens of Health’, in M. D. Grmek (ed.), Western
Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass., and
London, 1998), 291–318, at 307; D. P. Lockwood, Ugo Benzi: Medieval
Philosopher and Physician 1376–1439 (Chicago, 1951), 44–78, for a sample
discussion of consilia.
43 Exercise with the Small Ball 2, trans. Singer, 299 (5.900–1K ¼ Scripta
Minora, ed. J. Marquardt et al., 1.94). For hunting see R. Lane Fox, ‘Ancient
Hunting: From Homer to Polybius,’ in J. B. Salmon and G. Shipley (eds.),
Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity: Environment and Culture (London,
1996), 119–53, esp. 122, 147.