Asclepius: the god of medicine Gerald D. Hart Royal Society of Medicine Press, London (UK); 2000 262 pp. £17.50 (paper) ISBN 1-85315-409-1
In what clearly stands as a labour of long devotion, Gerald Hart, a well-known Ontario hematologist now living in England, has given us a readily accessible and well-illustrated book about the ancient healing god and patron saint of medicine. Hart, an expert on ancient coins, is particularly effective in applying numismatics to the story of temple healing.
Hart's Asclepius reminds me of Ralph Jackson's Doctors and Diseases in the Roman Empire (British Museum Press, 1988), a book not readily available on this side of the Atlantic. Hart makes appropriate use of this text and of two earlier books about Asclepius and his rod and serpent as a symbol for doctors and the medical profession, namely Károly Kerényi's Asklepios: Archetypical Image of the Physicians' Existence, translated from the German in 1959, and The Rod and the Serpent of Asklepios (1967) by Jan Schouten, a Dutch historian. These beautifully illustrated books are now hard to find.
So why yet another addition to the Asclepian annals? Hart tells us that he hoped “to popularize Asclepius and interpret the present day use of his staff and symbol.” As was true for his predecessors, Hart makes extensive use of the monumental work of Emma and Ludwig Edelstein, whose two-volume Asclepius: Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies appeared in 1945. It would have been helpful to mention that in 1998 the Johns Hopkins University Press brought out a paperback edition of this classic work.
Religious healing, as Henry Sigerist described so well in his chapter on the Asclepian legend in the second volume of his History of Medicine (1961), has a very long history that continues to the present. Medicine, like all crafts or callings, has a need to remind its practitioners of their origins and purposes, hence the ever-present fascination of books such as these. Even if there is nothing startling or very new in his account, Hart serves his purpose nicely by once again making readily available a discussion of the symbols of medicine.
There are a few jarring moments. To use the term “health care” to refer to ancient Greek or Roman practices is one. In two notes there are errors. Hart fails to mention that the work of Soranus on gynecology is readily available in an excellent translation by Owsei Temkin in a Johns Hopkins paperback edition. And to say that the British-born Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a North American medical degree (in 1849), disguised herself as a man is not only wrong but misses the point that her feminine presence had a calming effect on the rude and boisterous farm boys who were her classmates.
All in all, Hart has provided us with a nicely produced and well-presented analysis of the origins and continuing use of the symbols of the healing god of medicine. Asclepius and his staff, with a single snake, are as enduring as medicine itself.
Figure.
Photo by: Fred Sebastian