2 - Medicine in the Greek and Roman traditions

Summary

The popular esteem in which physicians were held in fifth century B.C. Greece is set forth by Pindar in his Pythian Ode (III.47–53) in which he extols the one skilled in medicine who enables:

those whosoever came suffering from the scores of nature, or with their limbs wounded either by grey bronze or by far-hurled stone, or with bodies wasting away with summer heat or winter's cold [to] be loosed and delivered … from divers pains, tending some of them with kindly songs, giving to others a soothing potion, or haply swathing their limbs with simples or restoring others by the knife.

Though Pindar is speaking here of Asklepios, it is his role as patron and prototype of physicians that is celebrated. In the Iliad (2.728–33) Homer mentions the two sons of Asklepios among those assembled with the ships for the attack on Troy, and in passing notes that they were “good healers both themselves”. The implication is that sons carry on the paternal vocational skill: like father, like sons. In the Pythian Ode of Pindar quoted above, Asklepios is an extraordinarily endowed human being, who is warned against seeking the life of the immortals. In other traditions, however, Asklepios is both the progenitor of a hereditary clan of physicians, known as the Asklepiads, and the god who comes to the aid of the sick when they visit his shrines, curing their diseases.