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196 Travel Sickness
Luqa’s Medical Regime for the Pilgrims to Mecca is the only
known medieval work with such a title. 66 Its author (d. c.912)
wrote it for a secretary of the Caliph in Baghdad around the
middle of the ninth century. Qusta was a Christian and so
would not have made the hajj himself. Nor could he have been
admitted to Mecca. He excuses himself, however, from accompanying
his dedicatee on the ground that he must not leave his
children. He identifies the need for a regimen as arising from
the pilgrim’s passing through ‘a country where there is no
doctor nor any required drug’, yet he reassures himself by
noting that the secretary will be accompanied ‘by a doctor able
to obtain whatever is necessary’. 67 He goes through what he
takes to be the standard topics that any travel regimen should
contain—food, fatigue, diseases caused by different winds,
prophylaxis against vermin, etc. He then adds some topics
which he thinks are especially necessary for the pilgrim to
Mecca: improving contaminated water, quenching one’s thirst,
dust in the eye, and, lastly, dealing with the worst of Arabian
parasites, the metre-long dracunculus medinensis, the Medina
worm or guinea worm, which some Islamic authors unfortunately
confused with a varicose vein. 68 On both kinds of topic,
the pilgrim and the ‘normal’ travel regimen, Qusta is ultimately
indebted to the Greek encyclopaedists Oribasius and Paul. He
is not deploying local knowledge. One cannot imagine the secretary
reading this work in his tent each night so as to anticipate
the next day’s risks. It seems more like a display of learning
designed to impress a powerful patron.
The same is true of the two known medieval European
examples of free-standing travel regimens. Pilgrimage remains
the occasion of writing, but in Europe it is the armed pilgrimage
of crusade. And the patrons are not less than royal. Beyond
a short chapter in Vegetius (Epitoma rei militaris 3.2), no sus-
66 Qusta ibn Luqa’s Medical Regime for the Pilgrims to Mecca: The Risala fi
tadbir safar al-hajj, ed. and trans. G. Bos (Leiden, 1992). See 5–6 for other
writings in Arabic in the genre.
67 Ibid. 16, 17.
68 D. Bennett, ‘Medical Practice and Manuscripts in Byzantium’, Social
History of Medicine, 13 (2000) (special issue, Medical Practice at the End of the
First Millennium, ed. P. Horden and E. Savage-Smith), 289–90; M. Ullmann,
Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh, 1978), 81–3.