Asclepius

Pilgrims travelling to Epidaurus, the most prominent of several Asclepius sanctuaries that also included Kos and Pergamon, underwent purification and sacrifice before sleeping in a special building, the abaton, in hope of a dream in which the god himself would appear, offer a diagnosis, perform a cure directly or instruct the sleeper in a remedy to carry out afterward. Non-venomous snakes were kept within the sanctuary grounds and were understood as embodiments or agents of the god's healing presence, moving freely among those sleeping in the abaton, an unusual degree of comfort with a living animal inside a space otherwise organized around ritual purity.

Inscribed stone stelae found at Epidaurus, known as the iamata, record specific first person style testimonies of pilgrims describing the ailments they arrived with and the cures they received, a form of temple publicity that functioned much like a public record of results meant to reassure and attract further visitors, and which gives modern historians of ancient medicine an unusually direct, if obviously self selected, body of evidence for how the sanctuary presented its own success. The iamata record a wide range of complaints, from blindness and paralysis to infertility and even, in a few entries, conditions modern readers would class as psychological rather than physical, and several inscriptions include a sceptical visitor whose doubt is dramatized and then overturned by the cure, a narrative device the sanctuary's own priests likely had a hand in shaping for exactly this persuasive effect.

Asclepius was born to Apollo and the mortal woman Coronis, who was killed, in most versions by Apollo or Artemis, after being unfaithful to the god while pregnant; the infant was rescued from his dying mother's funeral pyre and given to the centaur Chiron, already established in Greek myth as the wisest teacher of medicine and other arts, who trained him in healing to a level that eventually let him raise the dead, an achievement that so upset the boundary between mortality and immortality that Zeus killed Asclepius with a thunderbolt to restore the natural order. His cult gave him a family whose names encode aspects of health itself: his sons Machaon and Podalirius appear in the Iliad as healer warriors serving at Troy, and his daughters Hygieia and Panacea personify health and universal cure respectively, with Iaso and Aceso, personifying recuperation and the healing process, named in some sources as further daughters. The single snake entwined staff associated with Asclepius is frequently confused in modern commercial and even some medical branding with the unrelated two snake, winged staff called the caduceus, an attribute that belongs to Hermes rather than to any healing god and carries no ancient medical association at all.