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194 Travel Sickness
would later appear in the Canon, but displays its sources in
Galen, Oribasius, and Muslim scholars. It also adds, in both
its title and some of its jottings, a novel though obviously related
subject: regimen for the army (where they should pitch camp,
how they should protect their animals, etc.). A tidier, less
alluring, version of all this was to appear in Razi’s Kitab al-
Mansuri, dedicated to the governor of his native Rayy. 59 Razi,
however, affords us the chance to get behind the scenes of his
formal treatises and come as close as we can get to the daily
practice of a major Islamic physician. His Kitab al-Tajarib or
Casebook contains records of almost 900 cases treated or supervised
by him. We might expect the pathologies of travel to
figure significantly in it. Not so. One traveller about to depart
complains to him of dullness of vision in one eye. Another needs
help because he has swallowed some coins while on a journey,
presumably to avoid robbery, and cannot excrete them. 60 And
that is all. The paucity raises uncomfortable questions about the
bearing of regimen on reality, and not just in the Islamic context.
To Europe. Sections on travel are a relatively common
feature of general regimen, both Latin and vernacular (though
not, I think, in those associated with Salerno or in the Arabic
work known in Latin as the Tacuinum sanitatis). 61 Most often
their contents descend from Ibn Sina (Avicenna in the Latin
West) or Razi (Rhazes). But they do so in subject matter—food,
drink, weather, fatigue, seasickness—more than in detail: naturally
there are local adaptations and individual touches. For
example, in the earlier fourteenth century Maynus de Mayneriis
says that the rich should prepare for a voyage by mixing sea
water with their wine for several days beforehand, while the
poor should drink the sea water neat. Both will thereby avoid
Álvarez-Millán for help with this text and for informing me of the contents of
the manuscript cited in the next note.
59
Escorial, Real Biblioteca del Monasterio, Arabic MS 858, fos. 73a–81a.
60
C. Álvarez-Millán, ‘Practice versus Theory: Tenth-Century Case
Histories from the Islamic Middle East’, Social History of Medicine 13
(2000), special issue, Medical Practice at the End of the First Millennium,
ed. P. Horden and E. Savage-Smith, 298, 301.
61
Though see Ibn Butlan, Taqwim al-Sihha, Tacuini sanitatis, ed.
H. Elkhadem (Louvain, 1990), 217, 272. See further C. Thomasset, ‘Conseils
médicaux pour le voyage en mer au moyen âge’, in C. Buchet (ed.), L’homme,
la santé et la mer (Paris, 1997), 69–87.