The Asklepiadi often themselves imparted the principles of medicine to students outside their caste. Lay medicine thus gradually came to supplant sacerdotal medicine, especially after Hippocrates, who through his works, exercised a preponderant influence in the secularization of the science. However, the Asklepiadi, on their side, continued to practise medicine up to the time when the pagan temples fell into complete ruin, through the advance of Christianity.
On the columns of the asklepeia and on the votive tables were written the names of those cured by the god, together with indications regarding their various maladies and the treatment by virtue of which the sick had been restored to health.
Surgical instruments of proved utility were deposited in the temples. Celius Aurelianus makes mention of a leaden instrument used for the extraction of teeth (plumbeum odontagogon), which was exhibited in the temple of Apollo, at Delphi.
As a matter of fact, it would seem more natural that this instrument should have been shown in the temple of Æsculapius, he being the god of Medicine, and believed, besides, to be the inventor of dental extraction. One is rather inclined by this to think that the odontagogon may have been deposited in the temple of Apollo before the building of Æsculapian temples. Indeed, who can tell if Æsculapius himself, not yet deified, may not have deposited there a model of the instrument he had invented!
From the fact of the odontagogon in the temple of Apollo being made of lead, Erasistratus, Celius Aurelianus, and other ancient writers have drawn the deduction that it was only permissible to extract teeth when they were loose enough to be taken out with a leaden instrument. But Serre[44] observes, not without reason, that if a tooth be so unsteady as to be able to be extracted with leaden pincers, this may just as well be done, and perhaps even better, by pinching the tooth between the fingers, no other aid being required than a handkerchief to prevent them from slipping. Avulsive pincers of lead would be, therefore, a nearly useless invention; so it is much more probable, as Serre remarks, that the original pincers were of iron, and that the inventor, reserving these for his own use, made a simple model of the same in lead (this being easier to do) and deposited it in the temple of Apollo, in order to make known the form of the instrument to contemporaries and to posterity, naturally supposing that whoever wished to copy it would understand of himself, or learn from the priests, that it was to be made of iron and not of lead.
Portrayal of a dental operation on a vase of Phœnician origin, found in Crimea (see Cigrand, Rise, Fall, and Revival of Dental Prosthesis, pp. 60-63 and 287).
Hippocrates. The sacerdotal and philosophical schools of medicine, as well as the gymnasiums, were the three great sources whence Hippocrates derived his first knowledge of medicine.
Hippocrates was born in the island of Cos, toward the year 460 B.C. He belonged to the sacerdotal caste of the Asklepiadi, and was, according to some of his earliest biographers, the nineteenth descendant of Æsculapius on his father’s side, and the twentieth descendant of Hercules on his mother’s side. The time of his death is even still more uncertain than that of his birth, for, according to some, he died at eighty-three, according to others, at eighty-five, at ninety, at one hundred and four, and even at one hundred and nine years of age.