Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/83

 themselves to engage in the practice of the healing art, for acquiring the necessary familiarity with the different diseases and for learning how they should be treated.

The manner of conducting the preliminary treatment was probably not the same in every particular in all the different Asclepieia, and yet in the main the plan of procedure followed in Epidaurus, in Cos and in Athens undoubtedly resembled closely that which Pagel furnishes in his Geschichte der Medizin. It may be briefly described as follows:—

In the first place, moribund persons, the unclean, and women about to be confined were not admitted into the temple enclosure. The management of the latter class of patients was left entirely to women nurses, and, when it became evident that a person was likely to die, the individual was thereafter cared for outside the enclosure. In short, everything possible was done to keep out of sight all such objects as might produce an unpleasant impression upon applicants for treatment. After preliminary bathing and dieting, the patient was conducted into the temple enclosure and encouraged to make offerings and to pray to the god Aesculapius, an imposing statue of whom in marble was one of the first things that confronted him. As he was led about by the priest or an attendant, his imagination was wrought upon by the sight of numerous votive offerings exposed to view on the walls or columns of the buildings, by the singing of hymns in adoration of the god, and by the reading of the records of earlier cases inscribed on tablets or on the columns. After his mind had thus been worked upon, he was asked to furnish to the priest a detailed history of his own case and to submit to some sort of physical examination. As a final and most important step in this first stage of the treatment he was subjected to what was termed "the temple-sleep," during which the suggestion of the proper remedies to be employed was supposed to be communicated to him by the god himself.