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Travel Sickness 193
and Latin European worlds. My underlying questions remain
these. Is mobility represented as something special and separable
from normal life? To what extent is it emphasized in the
texts?
In an eleventh-century Arabic treatise on poisons can be
found paragraphs attributed to Rufus of Ephesus about how
travellers can protect themselves from reptiles and cold
weather. These may have been taken from a fuller, even monographic,
treatment of travel regimen that is listed as having been
among his compositions. If this work once existed, however, it
has left no trace in the Greek manuscript tradition and its
influence must remain conjectural. 55 Oribasius was, more
likely, the main link between antiquity and the Middle Ages.
The fragmentary regimens for walkers and sea-voyagers that he
preserved were translated, as part of his Synopsis, into Latin,
and they were copied by the seventh-century Greek medical
encyclopaedist Paul. 56 Thence they passed to the Arabs—or, if
not these excerpts in particular, then the idea of including such
regimens in more general guides to health preservation.
To take only the biggest names—those that, in translation,
were later to dominate the Latin tradition: Ibn Sina (d. 1037)
included in his Canon of Medicine a few pages for travellers on
coping with fatigue and indigestion, extremes of heat and cold,
changes of water supply, and seasickness (his advice on the last
is simply ‘ignore it’). 57 If Ibn Sina is the most famous of the ‘big
names’, Razi (d. 925) is the most interesting, and his writings
offer the most variegated information. His vast, posthumously
published, notebooks, the Hawi, give us, in their disorder, some
hint of the progress of his reading and thinking on the topic of
travel. He (or the students who published his work) placed the
section on travel in the context of regimen for the aged and the
obese. 58 This section runs through broadly the same topics that
55 Ullmann, ‘Neues’, 39.
56 Paul of Aegina, 1.50, 51, trans. F. Adams, The Seven Books of Paulus
Ægineta (London, 1849), i. 76–9.
57 Book I, 3rd fann, 4th talim, 1st jumla, in e.g. O. C. Gruner, A Treatise on
the Canon of Medicine of Avicenna, Incorporating a Translation of the First
Book (London, 1930).
58 Abu Bakr Muhammas Ibn Zakariyya ar-Razi, Kitab al-Hawi fi at-tibb
23 (Hyderabad, 1974), 209–24. I am immensely grateful to Cristina