As I have already intimated, the god of medicine—that is, Æsculapius[9]—was not only on familiar terms, so to speak, with the serpent, but at times given a serpentine form. Pausanias expressly informs us that he often appeared in such singular shape.[10] The visitor to imperial Rome about two thousand years ago saw this divinity in reptilian guise an object of high regard and worship. It is worth while to enter into a short study of the matter.
Now, at the outset, I may observe that it is a noteworthy fact that in their regard for medical men the early Greeks and others contrasted remarkably with the Romans. The Greeks would seem to have duly prized the class. One has but to turn to Homer to find evidence of the fact. A passage suggested by Machaon’s splendid exercise of his beneficent art, spoken by Idomeneus when the “offspring of the healing god” was wounded by a dart fired by “the spouse of Helen” (Paris), and “trembling Greece for her physician fear’d,” runs:—
“A wise physician skill’d our wounds to heal,
Is more than armies to the public weal.”[11]
Cowper translates this interesting couplet more literally than Pope:—
“One so skill’d in medicine and to free
The inherent barb is worth a multitude.”
This is a very noble tribute to the physician; in fact, I know of but few as good, among them being the one in “Ecclesiasticus” which reads: “The skill of the physician shall lift up his head and in the sight of great men he shall be praised.”[12] The latter is Hebræo-Egyptian in origin, and its date is about two hundred years before our era. The early Romans did not look on doctors with any such favor.[13]
It is a well-known fact that the art of medicine was never very enthusiastically or successfully cultivated by the Romans. It was not until a comparatively late date that medical practitioners existed among them at all. Pliny has left us some interesting notes on the matter. After the statement that many nations have gotten along without physicians, he says: “Such, for instance, was the Roman people for a period of more than six hundred years; a people, too, which has never shown itself slow to adopt all useful arts, and which even welcomed the medical art with avidity until, after a fair experience of it, there was found good reason to condemn it.”[14] He himself was not a great friend of it.