Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

162 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
but the original number is thought to have been in the hundreds.
A feature of some of the narratives is the emphasis upon the incredulity
that preceded the cure, as we see in the following example
from an inscription:
A man came to the god as a suppliant who was so blind in one eye that all
he had was an eyebrow with an empty eye socket. Some of the people in
the temple laughed at him for his stupidity in thinking that he would be
able to see when the eye socket was empty and contained nothing but a
depression. When the man slept, however, a vision appeared to him. The
god was seen to be preparing some medicine. He then opened the man’s
eyes and poured it over them. When day came, he could see with both
eyes and departed.
The cures recorded include blindness, dumbness, paralysis, lameness,
overextended pregnancies, infertility, headaches, and even
baldness. Not surprisingly, we do not hear of Asklepios performing
exorcisms or casting out devils, because these did not trouble the
classical imagination. Nor did his expertise extend to the treatment
of the mentally deranged. Incredible though many of the cures
may seem to us, the part played by religious faith in the healing
process should not be discounted. A 1995 study carried out at the
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center determined that those with
religious faith were more than three times as likely to survive heart
surgery than those without faith.
Although relations between the advocates of faith healing and
scientific medicine seem to have been essentially benign, some
rivalry did nonetheless exist. The author of the celebrated Hippocratic
treatise entitled On the Sacred Disease (2–5), for instance,
vehemently opposed the prevailing orthodoxy that epilepsy
was an affliction caused by the gods. Castigating “witch doctors,
faith-healers, quacks, and charlatans” for seeking to alleviate
the symptoms “by prescribing purifications and incantations
along with abstinence from baths,” he boldly asserted that epilepsy
“is not more divine than any other disease.” He concludes
with the claim that any skilled practitioner could cure the disease
“provided that he could distinguish the right moment for
the application of the remedies.” Similarly, the author of another
Hippocratic work entitled On the Diseases of Virgins declared that
menstrual irregularities in young girls could best be cured not by
making sacrifices to the virgin goddess Artemis but by having
intercourse—or rather (since it amounted to the same thing) by
getting married.