Much of what is known about incubation comes from stone stelae erected at Epidaurus itself, inscribed with dozens of formulaic cure narratives, of which a substantial number survive today, recording the patient's name, ailment, and the god's nocturnal intervention in a fixed literary style clearly meant to advertise the sanctuary's efficacy to future visitors as much as to record any individual case.
Historians of ancient medicine debate how to read these texts: some emphasize their role as a kind of religious advertising, curated success stories rather than a representative sample of outcomes, since a failed cure had no incentive to be inscribed in stone for public display, while others note genuine overlap between the remedies described in the dream narratives and treatments known from contemporary rational medicine, suggesting incubation sanctuaries and Hippocratic style physicians shared more common ground, and more patients, than a strict separation between religious and secular healing would suggest. What is not disputed is the practice's longevity and geographic spread, with major Asklepieia operating at Epidaurus, Kos, Pergamon, Athens and elsewhere across the Greek world for the better part of a thousand years.