Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Private Life 161
The Greeks attributed the rise of scientific medicine to the influence
of Hippokrates of Kos, a shadowy figure about whom nothing
is known for certain, although many early medical writings
were ascribed to him. Among them is a book entitled Aphorisms,
which begins with the statement, “Life is short. Art is long. Opportunity
is brief. Experiment is dangerous. Judgement is difficult.” It
serves as a fitting comment about the risks attendant upon medical
intervention throughout antiquity. Like other aspects of Greek life,
however, medicine never wholly divorced itself from its religious
roots. In fact, the growth of the cult of the healing god Asklepios at
the beginning of the fifth century b.c.e. exactly parallels the birth
of the tradition of scientific medical inquiry. Sickness and its cure
were henceforth identified as areas of both professional and divine
concern.
Temple Medicine
From the fifth century b.c.e. onward, sanctuaries of the healing
god Asklepios, such as that of Epidauros in the northeast Peloponnese,
functioned as both religious and medical centers. This
is demonstrated by the fact that surgical instruments and votive
offerings in the form of parts of the body are commonly found
there, the latter in the hope of securing the god’s intervention on
behalf of the body part represented. Physicians, no less than their
patients, would have regarded medical expertise as an art, which
was, at root, a gift of the god. The fact that Hippocratic physicians
took their oath in the name of Asklepios and other healing deities
affords further proof of the complementarity of the two approaches.
As late as the second century c.e., Galen claimed that he took up
medicine because the god appeared to him in a dream and urged
upon him a medical career when his father was sick.
The healing that was practiced at the sanctuaries of Asklepios is
likely to have been a potent mixture of medicine, autosuggestion,
faith healing, and perceived divine intervention. At night, the sick
slept within the temple precincts waiting for a vision from the god
to reveal the source of their cure (a process often referred to as
incubation), while by day perhaps they entrusted their aches and
pains to human physicians. Reports of miraculous cures (known
as iamata ) are preserved on tablets that were erected in the sanctuary,
their purpose being to propagate the report of the god’s
miraculous powers to the Greek world at large and thus, too, pour
encourager les autres. Forty-four cures are recorded at Epidauros,