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Travel Sickness 195
seasickness. 62 It is a token gesture towards inclusiveness, reminiscent
of the Hippocratic author who claimed to be writing for
the great majority; and it goes well beyond the brief references
to wine in the Muslim authorities. As well as such additions to
the mainstream, there are also chronological developments.
The most striking of these is the inclusion in travel regimens,
from the close of the fifteenth century on, of measures to reduce
the risk of contracting syphilis by avoidance of communal baths
and by checking the bed linen wherever one stays. 63
5. free-standing regimens
I take the last example from an article of 1911 by the great Karl
Sudhoff. 64 Besides publishing some short fifteenth- to sixteenth-century
consilia pro iter agentibus, this paper has introductory
material which remains, in some respects, the most
recent synoptic view of its topic in print (despite two invaluable
sections in the Catalan edition of Arnald of Villanova, to whom
I return). 65 Sudhoff implicitly raises the question of whether
the Reiseregimen is a distinct genre. We have seen it developing
as a predictable presence in larger medical works. I should like
to end by sharpening Sudhoff’s question into this one: when,
and in what circumstances, has travel regimen been the subject
of a whole, free-standing, work? When has it been privileged by
separate treatment and publication, at greater length than that
of the consilia or the sections in handbooks and encyclopaedias?
From antiquity the answer is reasonably clear. There is no
evidence that Diocles of Carystus wrote a whole book on the
subject. Rufus of Ephesus, as we saw, is attested as having done
that, but no one else. Who came next? From medieval Islam
only two works of this kind are recorded and only one of them
survives. The survivor is a strange production. Qusta ibn
62 Praxis medicinalis, 2.30 (Lyons, 1586), 43, quoted by P. Gil-Sotres in
Arnaldi de Villanova Opera Medica Omnia, vol. 10.1, ed. L. García-Ballester
and M. R. McVaugh (Barcelona, 1996), 861 n. 112.
63 K. Sudhoff, ‘Ärztliche Regimina für Land- und Seereisen aus dem 15.
Jahrhundert’, Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 4 (1911), 263–81, at 279–80.
64 See ibid.
65 Arnaldi de Villanova Opera Medica Omnia, 10.1, 384–94/851–61; 10.2,
ed. M. R. McVaugh (Barcelona, 1998), 191–200. But also see Thomasset,
‘Conseils médicaux’