Ruins of ancient Corinth near the Asklepieion · Wikimedia Commons

Asklepieion of Corinth

Asclepieum Corinthi

AsklepieionAchaea · Ancient Corinth, GreeceBuilt 400 BCE

About

Healing sanctuary at the north edge of Corinth, built beside a spring that patients believed carried curative power. Excavators recovered hundreds of terracotta votives shaped like the body parts pilgrims hoped to heal, from hands to organs. Its four-columned temple, late 4th century BCE, was rebuilt after an earthquake and stood alongside dining rooms for patients. Corinth, refounded as a Roman colony in 44 BCE, still kept the Asklepieion running when Trajan died in 117.

What happened here

A healing sanctuary where the treatment is a night's sleep. Patients purify themselves, sacrifice, and then lie down in a long open hall to wait for a dream in which the god appears and either heals them or prescribes. In the morning the priests interpret. The prescriptions are practical as often as not — diet, exercise, cold baths, a walk — and there are doctors on site alongside the priests, with no sense that the two are in competition. Cured patients pay for a plaque recording what was wrong and what was done, and the walls fill with them; a model of the healed limb or organ is the cheaper option. Snakes and dogs live in the precinct and are part of the treatment.