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Asklepieion of Kos
About
Birthplace-by-legend of the physician Hippocrates and one of the ancient world's premier medical sanctuaries, built in stacked terraces on a pine-covered hillside. King Eumenes II of Pergamon funded its grand Doric temple in the 2nd century BCE, modeled on the sanctuary at Epidaurus. A fourth building phase was underway under Roman rule as Trajan's reign ended, adding terraces to a site already four centuries old. Physicians here used methods later cited by the doctor Galen.
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.
In ancient writing
- Strabo, Geography 14.2.19
A famous sanctuary outside the town, hung with votive tablets recording cures — the same tablets Hippocrates was said to have learned from.
Sources
Nearby
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