The temples and ritual of Asklepios at Epidauros and Athens : Two lectures delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

  • Caton, Richard
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The temples and ritual of Asklepios at Epidauros and Athens : Two lectures delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    shelter-seats, would dream over history, plays, or poetry. The solemn rites of the temple, the sacrifices, the study of the multitudinous tablets, would all tend to a calm and hopeful condition of mind, eminently helpful to recovery from slight forms of illness, even though no direct medical treatment were pursued. In earlier times it seems as though the health-restoring influence of the shrines was thought to be wholly miraculous, with but small aid or none from art : the god alone achieved all. The more ancient inscriptions contain childishly absurd reports of miraculous cures. The ruling idea was that the deity appeared to the sick man in the abaton, applied some medicament, performed some operation, or instructed the dreaming patient to carry out some sanative action when he awoke. The frauds of the god or his priest were so outrageous that some of the old Greeks seem almost to have equalled in folly and credulity the moderns, who readily buy soap or pills on no other warranty than the advertisements of a lying and interested vendor. On the walls of the eastern abaton were fixed two large stone tablets, bearing the title, Cures by Apollo and Asklepios. Most of the fragments of these tablets have been recovered, pieced together, and deciphered by M. Cavvadias and other learned palaeographers. The following are a few extracts :— Line 72 of the first tablet in the abaton.—A man who had only one eye is visited by the god in the abaton during the night. The god applies an ointment to the empty orbit. On awaking, the man finds he has two sound eyes. Line 125.—Thyson of Hermione is blind of both eyes ; a temple dog licks the organs and he immediately regains his sight. Line 107.—Hermodicos of Lampsacus comes to the Hieron in a paralyzed condition. As he sleeps in the abaton the god tells him to rise, to walk outside the precinct, and carry back into it the largest stone he can find. He does so, and brings in a stone so heavy that no other man can lift it, and the stone, as the inscription says, still lies before the abaton. The same stone (probably) lies there to-day, and the visitor may yet in vain emulate the feat of Hermodicos. It will be recognised in the illustration, Plate XXXI, by the hole cut in it to put the hands in. Line 113.—A man had his foot lacerated by the bite of a
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