New historical research has found that early stagecoach passengers were as concerned with motion sickness as they were with the risk of being robbed by highwaymen.
Letters, diaries and medical texts from the 17th and 18th centuries reveal that, far from being a ‘modern complaint’, motion sickness was being talked about as a hazard of travel more than 200 years ago.
Having one’s personal space invaded by loud or smelly strangers and being forced to sit close to members of the opposite sex or those from lower classes also struck fear and loathing in the hearts of early commuters.
The research, conducted by historian Dr Alun Withey of the University of Exeter, challenges the romanticised “merrie olde England” view of the growth of stagecoaches and travel more broadly. It’s been published in the journal, Social History of Medicine .
“When people think about stagecoaches, they conjure romanticised images based on TV costume dramas,” says Dr Withey, of Exeter’s Department of Archaeology and History. “But in fact, travelling by commercial stagecoaches was often unpleasant and physically uncomfortable. And those early experiences will resonate with modern audiences who may be familiar with the sensation of motion sickness in cars or coaches today.”
Dr Withey embarked upon this first-ever historical study of land-based motion sickness after finding references to it in several letters from the time. Consulting online databases including ‘Enlightenment Letters’, ‘Social Bodies’, and ‘Curious Travellers’, he found numerous descriptions of what it was like to travel on the roads of 17th and 18th-century England. He also consulted travel narratives and accounts, medical texts and other publications.
“With the introduction of stagecoaches and improvements to road infrastructure, travel by coach expanded through the eighteenth century, enabling more people to travel more frequently and over longer distances,” said Dr Withey. “For many, this was no gentle waft through the Georgian countryside, however. It was a rattling, lurching plunge down tracks and roads that were rough and knotty in good weather, and perilous in bad.
“Neither was the environment inside the coach conducive to comfort. Passengers spent long hours crammed together in its mephitic atmosphere, enduring the sweating, coughing and farting bodies and ‘twattling chatter’ of their fellows. At its worst, coach travel threatened a full-scale assault on body and senses. It could be an intensive, disruptive somatic experience, and a deeply embodied form of mobility.”
Among the correspondence discovered by Dr Withey was the observations of Sophia Hoare, who, after travelling through South Wales in 1809, said she was ‘heartily tired with the jumbling and jolting of our miserable vehicle’. On another occasion, she was ‘jumbled and jolted [by the coach] till all my bones ached’.
Anne Lister, in 1822, was ‘exceedingly jolted’ and on another occasion ‘shockingly jolted’ by the movement of her coach across bad roads.
The repeated use of the word ‘jolt’, said Dr Withey, demonstrated how it had come into existence specifically to describe the irregular and unpredictable motion of stagecoaches, one that challenged bodies and senses.
Writing to his father in 1656, the English philosopher John Locke complained of enduring a ‘thousand squeezes’ in a three-day coach journey packed in tightly with six passengers. He was also physically repelled, to the point of nausea, by the corpulent body of one woman.
In 1686, Robert Boyle noted that ‘Over-charging of the Air [inside the coach] with the fuliginous Reeks of Men’s Bodies’ could see passengers subject to ‘Faintness, or cast into a Swoon, by the closeness of the Place’.
Coach travel also prompted debate among medical experts of the time, broadly divided between those who thought the movement of the coach was a form of exercise, and a means of preventing ‘corrupted humours from pooling in the body’, and those who believed it caused harm.
Dr Withey said: “As the narratives and letters of past travellers reveal, various aspects of coach travel served to cause both physical and psychological unease. The atmosphere, heat or cold, and smell of the coach strongly affected the embodied experience. Squashed, stinking and ‘stewed’ bodies nauseated other passengers, combining or adding to the already complicated experience of motion.”
Jolted, Stewed and Jumbled: Motion, Discomfort and the Body in English Coach Travel, c. 1660-1820 is published in Social History of Medicine .
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Jolted, Stewed, and Jumbled: Motion, Discomfort, and the Body in English Coach Travel, c. 1660–1820
8-Jun-2026