Asclepius And Hippocrates: An Analysis

The God of Medicine, Asclepius, and Father of Medicine, Hippocrates, were the personification of healing in antiquity. Hippocrates, according to Gary B. Ferngren, was “the embodiment of medical wisdom, and the exemplar of the ideal physicians” (Ferngren, 41). On the other hand, Asclepius was “the patron of both physicians and patients” and “represented a last hope for those whose disease could not be… cured” (Ferngren, 51-53). It was generally understood that these two characters “flourished side by side” (Ferngren, 51). Greek physicians often considered religious medicine “as complementing [to] their own practice” (Ferngren, 53), and the line between religious and secular medicine was blurred because of the dominating belief that “both… aspects
of healing… came from the same god” (Ferngren, 53). Therefore, Hippocrates and the physicians of antiquity shared a symbiotic relationship with Asclepius. The physicians of antiquity worked in tandem with religion in that patients would first seek the guidance of the physicians before pursuing divine treatment (Ferngren, 53-54).
Ferngren stated that the Greek physicians “accepted the validity of divine dreams and had no philosophical objections to religious healing” (Ferngren, 53). The practitioners also considered “[medicine as] a divine art that had been given to humanity by a god” (Ferngren, 47). As a result, the Greeks believed that the inherent divine nature of medicine can be used to cure diseases that were once considered divine in origin (Ferngren, 46). There was a sense that Hippocrates and the practitioners were of a status above ordinary people because they were performing divine work. The Hippocratic Oath was a religious promise to the deities that the physicians under oath would be accountable for the divine authority given to them (Ferngren, 42-43). Despite the overwhelming power that physicians wielded, the Hippocratic practitioners were able to maintain a modest decorum because they understood the limits of their abilities. Ferngren explained that “[when] Greek physicians believed they could no longer help a patient… the physicians freed the patients to seek… the direct help of the god Asclepius” (Ferngren, 53). The Hippocratic physicians never doubted the fundamental idea that the “[art of healing] was given to [them] by [Asclepius]” (Ferngren,
47). The contemporary interpretation of the relationship between Hippocrates and Asclepius was understood by Ferngren as a symbol of scientific progress. The Hippocratic acceptance that diseases had natural causes marked the beginning of when humanity assumed control over nature despite the accompanying belief that medicine was divine. The staunch belief that Asclepius bestowed the divine art of medicine to humanity had inadvertently gave rise to the Greek understanding that “every natural event was divine” (Ferngren, 46). Thus, human practitioners were no longer constrained by the notion that the power of healing belonged strictly to the gods. As a result of the relationship between Hippocrates and Asclepius, medicine became “both rational and empirical: rational in its freedom from belief in divine etiologies and its search for natural causes of diseases, empirical in the collection of… careful descriptions of symptoms based on meticulous clinical observation” (Ferngren, 44). The Hippocratic belief that medicine was divine in origin was the moment when “medicine began to take on the form of a science as well as that of a craft”