Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

The Doctor and the Crow

The Birth of Medicine

There was once an intensely attractive young princess called CORONIS, who came from the Thessalian kingdom of Phlegyantis. So great was her beauty that she caught the attention of the god Apollo, who took her as a lover. You might think that the companionship and love of the most beautiful of the gods would be enough for anyone, but Coronis – while pregnant with Apollo’s child – fell for the charms of a mortal called ISCHYS and slept with him.

One of Apollo’s white crows witnessed this act of betrayal and flew back to tell his master all about the insult to his honour. Enraged, Apollo asked his sister Artemis to take revenge. Only too willing, she attacked the palace at Phlegyantis with plague arrows – poisoned darts that spread a terrible disease throughout the compound. Many besides Coronis were infected. The crow saw all and returned to give Apollo a full report.

‘She’s dying, my lord, dying!’

‘Did she say anything? Did she admit her guilt?’

‘Oh yes, oh yes. “I deserve my fate,” she said. “Tell the great god Apollo that I ask no forgiveness and beg no pity, beg no pity, only save the life of our child. Save the life of our child.” Ha! Ha! Ha!’

With such malicious glee did the crow crow, that Apollo lost his temper and turned it black. All crows, ravens and rooks ever since have been that colour.fn1

When Apollo, now filled with remorse, reached plague-stricken Phlegyantis he found Coronis lying dead on her funeral pyre, the flames licking all round her. With a cry of grief he leapt through the flames and from her womb cut out their child who was still living. Apollo raised Coronis to the stars as the constellation Corvus, the Crow.fn2

The rescued infant boy, whom Apollo named Asclepius, was put in the care of the centaur Chiron. Perhaps because he had been delivered by a surgical procedure (albeit a rather violent one), perhaps because while he had been in the womb infection had raged all around him, perhaps because his father was Apollo, god of medicine and mathematics – probably for all these reasons – Asclepius demonstrated early on some very remarkable talents in the field of medicine.

As the boy grew, it quickly became clear to Chiron that he allied an incisive, logical and curious mind with a natural gift for healing. Chiron, no mean naturalist, herbalist and reasoner himself, took enormous pleasure in training the boy in the medical arts. Besides giving him a thorough grounding in the anatomy of animals and humans, he taught him that knowledge is gained from observation and careful record-keeping rather than from spinning theories. He showed him how to gather medicinal plants, grind them, mix them, heat them, and work them into powders, potions and preparations that could be eaten, drunk or stirred into food. He instructed him how to staunch blood flow, concoct fomented poultices, dress wounds and reset fractured bones. By the time he was fourteen he had saved a soldier’s leg from being amputated, brought a fevered young girl back from the very brink of death, rescued a bear from a trap, saved the population of a village from an epidemic of dysentery and relieved the suffering of a bruised snake by the application of an ointment of his own devising. This last case proved to be invaluable, for the grateful serpent had licked Asclepius’s ear in thanks, whispering as he did so many secrets of the arts of healing that were closed even to Chiron.

Athena, to whom snakes were sacred, bestowed her thanks too, in the form of a jar of Gorgon’s blood. You might think this a poor gift. Far from it. Sometimes the law of opposites applies. A single drop of the silvery-gold ichor that keeps the gods immortal is fatal for humans to touch or taste. The blood of a creature as deadly and dangerous as a serpent-haired Gorgon, on the other hand, has the power to bring the dead back to life.

By the time he was twenty Asclepius had mastered all the arts of surgery and medicine. He embraced his teacher Chiron in a fond farewell and left to set up on his own as the world’s first physician, apothecary and healer. His fame spread around the Mediterranean with great speed. The sick, lame and unhappy flocked to his surgery, outside which he hung a sign – a wooden staff with a snake twined round it, seen to this day on many ambulances, clinics and (often disreputable) medical websites.fn3

He married EPIONE, whose name means ‘soothing’ or ‘relief from pain’. Together they had three sons and four daughters. Asclepius trained his girls as rigorously as Chiron had trained him.

The eldest, HYGIEIA, he taught the practices of cleanliness, diet and physical exercise that are today named ‘hygiene’ after her.

To PANACEA he revealed the arts of universal health, of medicinal preparation and the production of remedies and treatments that could heal anything – which is what her name means: ‘cure all’.

ACESO he instructed in the healing process itself, including what we would now call immunology.

The youngest girl IASO specialized in recovery and recuperation.

The elder boys, MACHAON and PODALIRIUS, became prototypes of the army doctor. Their later service in the Trojan War was recorded by Homer.

The youngest son, TELESPHORUS, is usually depicted as being hooded and of very restricted growth. His field of study was rehabilitation and convalescence, the return of a patient to full health.

All might have gone well had Asclepius kept tightly sealed the jar that Athena presented to him. Tightly sealed. Whether it was the glory of being celebrated as a kind of saint and saviour or whether it was a genuine desire to beat death with his arts we cannot know, but Asclepius used the Gorgon’s blood once to revive the corpse of a dead patient, then a second time, and soon he was using it as liberally and regularly as castor oil.

Hades began to grumble and fume. Unable to bear it any longer he went so far as to leave the underworld and stand angrily before the throne of his brother Zeus.

‘This man is denying me souls. He pulls them back from Thanatos just as they are ready to cross over to us. Something must be done.’

‘I agree,’ said Hera. ‘He is subverting the proper order of things. If a person is marked down for death it is quite unacceptable for a mortal to interfere. Your daughter did a very foolish thing in giving him Gorgon’s blood.’

Zeus frowned. There was no denying the truth of what they said. He was disappointed in Athena. She had not betrayed him in so flagrant and unforgivable a manner as Prometheus, but there were points of similarity that troubled him. Mortals were mortal and that was that. Allowing them access to potions that gave them ascendancy over death was quite wrong.

The thunderbolt which struck Asclepius was wholly unexpected, as bolts from the blue always are. It killed him stone dead. All of Greece lamented the loss of their beloved and valued physician and healer, but Apollo did more than mourn the passing of his son. He raged. As soon as he heard the news he took himself off to the workshop of Hephaestus and with three swift arrows shot dead Brontes, Steropes and Arges, the Cyclopes whose eternal task and pleasure it was to manufacture the Sky Father’s thunderbolts.

Such astounding rebelliousness was not to be brooked. Zeus was intolerant of any threat to his authority and always moved swiftly to put down the slightest hint of insurrection. Apollo was thrown from Olympus and commanded to serve the Thessalian king ADMETUS in a lowly position for a year and a day. Admetus had earned the approval of Zeus by his exceptionally warm hospitality and kindness to strangers – always a direct route to Zeus’s heart.

Apollo had been punished when young, you will recall, for slaying the serpent Python. His beauty, splendour and golden charm hid a stubborn will and a hot temper. He submitted to this punishment readily enough, however. Admetus was impossible to dislike and, serving as his cowherd, Apollo ensured that every cow under his care gave birth to twins.fn4 Cattle and twins were special to him.

Asclepius, meanwhile, was raised to the heavens as the constellation Ophiuchus, the Serpent-Bearer.

Later traditions asserted that Zeus restored Asclepius to life and raised him up as a god. It is true that throughout the Mediterranean world he and his wife and daughters were worshipped as divine. Temples to him, known as asclepia, sprang up everywhere, bearing great similarities to modern spas and health clubs. Their officiating priests wore white and bathed, massaged and pampered the paying supplicants with preposterous oils, creams and patent mixtures, just as they do today. Ever sacred to Asclepius, snakes (the non-venomous kind) were encouraged to slither about the treatment rooms and clinics, a sight perhaps less common in our contemporary temples to health. The spirit and mind were as attended to then as they are now. ‘Holistic’ is, after all, a Greek-derived word. Dreams were told to priests on the morning after an overnight stay (known as an ‘incubation’) and Asclepius himself often manifested to patients. Especially, I believe, to those who paid the most.

The Asclepion of Epidaurus was as big a draw as the town’s celebrated theatre is today. Those who visit it can still see records of the illnesses, treatments, diets and cures of the patients who flocked there.