Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/74

 would gradually entail upon the organization of priest-physicians a serious money loss. As will be seen further on, the oath known as "the Hippocratic Oath" omits these mercenary features, and thus places the vocation of physician upon a much higher level.

It is an interesting fact, as noted by Hollaender, of Berlin, that Homer does not make the slightest mention of temples dedicated to Aesculapius; from which circumstance it may be inferred that a long time—perhaps several hundred years—elapsed, after his death, before his countrymen realized fully his greatness and the value of the services which he had rendered in his rôle of physician. Of the temples which were then built in his honor, all have long since fallen into ruins, but in recent years excavations have been made at some of the more important of these sites and under the guidance of competent scholars, and as a result our knowledge of the state of medicine in Greece between the time of Homer and the appearance of the Hippocratic writings has been greatly enlarged. The facts revealed by these excavations and the statements which are to be found in classical Greek literature, but which previously did not receive all the consideration that they deserved, have now been pieced together and we have thus been furnished with a fairly satisfactory picture of the relations of the different chambers and spaces in these temples, and with a more or less complete account of the manner in which affairs were conducted by those in charge. The following short description which is based on the account recently published by Professor Meyer-Steineg of Jena, Germany, will put the reader in possession of all the more important facts.

There were two principal types of Asclepieia—one, like that of Epidaurus, in Argolis, which occupied an inland situation, that had clearly been chosen from religious motives alone, viz., because it was believed, in accordance with an ancient tradition, that at this spot Aesculapius had