Had fallen in battle, and before his eyes.
(Book IV. of the Odyssey, Lines 275–284.)
In former years and down almost to the present time, it was the custom among English medical writers to speak of Aesculapius only as the “God of Medicine,” thus conveying to the minds of many readers that he was a mythological character, not a real personage. To-day, and especially since Schliemann has demonstrated, by his excavations at the site of ancient Troy, that Homer’s Iliad is not merely a beautiful creation of his poetic fancy, but a narration of events that actually occurred about 1200 B. C., it is quite generally acknowledged that Aesculapius[14] is an historical character, an individual whose memory should receive due honor from the physicians of modern times. Neither Homer nor Pindar speaks of him as a god. In Athens he was publicly deified in 420 B. C.
When Daremberg, as quoted above, expressed the belief that Hippocrates was the product of an earlier civilization, he undoubtedly gave due weight to other circumstances beside those which are narrated in Homer’s poems—circumstances, for example, which are referred to casually by several of the classical Greek authors, and to which fresh importance has been given by a number of recent discoveries. Thus, there is an abundance of evidence showing that the Greeks, both before and after Homer’s time, held the memory of Aesculapius in the very highest honor. So great, as they believed, was his power over disease, so wonderful were the cures which he accomplished, and so noble and pure was his character, that they made him a god and erected temples in his honor—not mere places where a barren worship might be carried on, but veritable sanatoria—termed Asclepieia—where the extraordinary healing powers of him whom they had made a god might be perpetuated for the benefit of succeeding generations. While, on the one hand, the ancient Greeks may have been full of superstitious beliefs, they were at the same time as kindly disposed toward their fellow men, as generous in their spending of money for this purpose, and as practical in their selection of suitable methods as are the benefactors of to-day all over the world. In course of time these so-called temples became the prototypes of our hospitals, sanatoria and schools of medicine, and it therefore seems only proper that they should here be described somewhat in detail.
The so-called Aesculapian Temples and their Chief Purpose.—The first of these temples, or Asclepieia, were established at Trikka, in Thessaly; at Cnidus, on the coast of Caria in Asia Minor, opposite Cos; at Epidaurus, in Argolis, Greece; at Cyrene on the northern coast of Lybia, Africa, opposite the Island of Crete; at Crotona, on the southeastern coast of Italy; and, finally, at Athens. It is said that traces of as many as eighty of these Asclepieia have been found in different parts of the ancient world. One of them, for example, is known to have existed on the small island (Isola San Bartolommeo) in the Tiber, at Rome. Their management was intrusted, in the earlier years of their existence, to men who were descendants of Aesculapius—i.e., the sons and grandsons of Machaon and Podalirius. They were both priests and physicians, and are mentioned in history as the Asclepiadae. With the progress of time it became necessary, as one may readily understand, to intrust the temple service to individuals who were not members of the family of Aesculapius. The original Asclepiadae guarded as valuable secrets the methods of treatment and the pharmaceutic formulae which had been handed down to them by the head of the family. It was therefore natural, when these newly adopted members were installed in office, that they should be made to promise, under oath, not to “divulge these secrets to any but their own sons, the sons of their teachers, or the pupils who were preparing themselves to become regular physicians.” (Neuburger.)
The divulging of these secrets, it may be assumed, would gradually entail upon the organization of priest-physicians a serious money loss. As will be seen further on, the oath known as “the Hippocratic Oath” omits these mercenary features, and thus places the vocation of physician upon a much higher level.
It is an interesting fact, as noted by Hollaender, of Berlin, that Homer does not make the slightest mention of temples dedicated to Aesculapius; from which circumstance it may be inferred that a long time—perhaps several hundred years—elapsed, after his death, before his countrymen realized fully his greatness and the value of the services which he had rendered in his rôle of physician. Of the temples which were then built in his honor, all have long since fallen into ruins, but in recent years excavations have been made at some of the more important of these sites and under the guidance of competent scholars, and as a result our knowledge of the state of medicine in Greece between the time of Homer and the appearance of the Hippocratic writings has been greatly enlarged. The facts revealed by these excavations and the statements which are to be found in classical Greek literature, but which previously did not receive all the consideration that they deserved, have now been pieced together and we have thus been furnished with a fairly satisfactory picture of the relations of the different chambers and spaces in these temples, and with a more or less complete account of the manner in which affairs were conducted by those in charge. The following short description which is based on the account recently published by Professor Meyer-Steineg of Jena, Germany, will put the reader in possession of all the more important facts.[15]
FIG. 1. VIEW OF THE TEMPLE OF AESCULAPIUS ON THE ISLAND OF COS.
As it must have appeared to the traveler, in the third century B. C., on his approach by sea to the port of that island.