Greek Physician and Eventually Celebrated

¶ … Greek physician and eventually celebrated as a god in his own right, very few actual facts are known about the man Asclepius. The temple shrines that were erected in his honor and served as centers of healing for the ancient Greeks were more places of religion and suggestion than they were institutions of science, investigation, and straightforward diagnostics and treatments. Patients -- admitted only after a priest had determined that they were not ill enough to die while in the temple, which would besmirch the good name of the healing offered there -- were effectively in charge of their own treatment, expected to dream and either be healed in that dream, or receive instructions as to how to be healed through herbs and possibly other means and practices. Asclepius was often a figure in these dreams, providing instructions or carrying out the healing task.

A very similar set of temples, rituals, and beliefs emerged in Egypt at around the same time, with Imhotep -- again, a real person that eventually became so enshrouded in mythology and divinity that much of the truth about the man is lost -- serving as the physician-god. The same rules of ritual fasting, sleeping and having an "inspired" dream, and even some of the snake symbology were all similar between the Greek cults of Asclepius and the Egyptian worship of Imhotep. This led many of the Greek "tourists" of the day, observing another culture with remarkable similarities to their own, to accept Imhotep as the same god as Asclepius, possibly strengthening their belief in their own mythology and practices because they were so closely repeated and adhered to by another great culture.

Like imhotep and Asclepius, though to a lesser degree, Hippocrates' life is so shrouded in myth that it is difficult to state many facts about the man. He certainly existed, hwoever, and was one of the first to apply true rules of logic and science to the practice of medicine. This was possible largely because of the changes made in philosophy both by the pre-Socratics, who determined that the gods were not responsible for the laws of nature, and the major Athenian philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who developed a system of rigorous logic that was attached to investigations of truth. Hippocrates focused on keeping the body healthy through preventative medicine, and that the body would often return to its natural state unaided -- thus the injunction to "do no harm."