It’s a cliché to say that medicine is a science. It isn’t. Medicine is not a science—it is a practice based on sciences—physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, economics—that differs from other technical disciplines because its object is a subject: the human being. The author reconstructs the historical development of the scientific body of knowledge that medicine now possesses and considers this body as the necessary means to achieve the purpose of being a physician—that is, a person who treats fellow humans with competence and compassion.
(Giorgio Cosmacini, "La medicina non una scienza"
https://books.google.nl/books/about/La_medicina_non_%C3%A8_una_scienza_Breve_sto.html?id=NyfWLgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y)
One might add: a practice based on sciences that are largely ignored or misunderstood by its practitioners. But that’s irrelevant.
It’s irrelevant because, for all the talk of the scientific method, we must reckon with archetypes. Healing performed by shamans or priests predates physics, chemistry, biology, and probably even mathematics. Forget the how and the means: the pure function is archetypal. In classical antiquity, the Asclepeion was a temple/healing sanctuary consecrated to Asclepius. Asclepius (or Aesculapius) was a demigod son of Apollo (his mother varies by source), with equally mythical healing powers.
Coronis was washing her feet in Lake Boebeis. Apollo saw her and desired her. For him, desire was a sudden jolt, striking him unawares and one he immediately wanted to discharge. He descended upon Coronis like the night. Their union was violent, intoxicating, and swift. In Apollo’s mind, grasping a body and shooting an arrow were the same act. The joining of bodies was not mingling, as with Dionysus, but impact. Thus one day he killed Hyacinthus, the youth he most loved: during a game, by throwing a discus.
Coronis was pregnant with Apollo’s child when she became attracted to a stranger from Arcadia named Ischys. A white raven watched over her, assigned by Apollo as a guardian “so that no one would violate her.” The raven saw Coronis surrender to Ischys. It flew to Delphi to tattle to its master, reporting Coronis’s “hidden deeds.” In fury, Apollo threw down his plectrum. His laurel crown fell to the dust. He glared at the raven, whose feathers turned pitch black. Then Apollo asked his sister Artemis to go kill Coronis at Lacereia. Artemis’s arrow pierced the traitor’s breast, and along the steep shores of Lake Boebeis, she killed many more women. Before dying, Coronis whispered to the god that he had also killed his own son. Apollo then tried to revive her, in vain. His healing arts proved insufficient. But when Coronis’s fragrant body was laid on a pyre high as a wall, and the flames began to consume it, they parted before the god’s rapacious hand, who extracted from her womb the unharmed Asclepius, he who heals.
(*Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, see note)
One of Asclepius’s daughters was named Panacea, and she had the power to heal any illness. It was he who resurrected Glaucus, son of Minos, according to Hippolytus—although in the more classical version it was Polyeidos who brought Glaucus back to life. This suggests that, in myth, Polyeidos the seer-priest and Asclepius the healing demigod are practically interchangeable. Asclepius had been taught medicine by none other than Chiron the Centaur—the same one who healed Achilles’s ankle by replacing it with that of a dead giant.
This material dates from before the collapse of the Late Bronze Age—that is, from the time of Homeric epic. Asclepius’s staff, a rod with a single coiled serpent, is essentially a simplified version of the Caduceus—the symbol on pharmacy signs. The Caduceus, which predates classical iconography by centuries, is the attribute of Mercury (Hermes), the messenger of the gods, deity of logos and communication. One could imagine that the staff of a demigod couldn’t bear the full symbolism of that of a god—hence, one serpent instead of two. Hierarchies matter in Greek mythology: according to Hippolytus, when Asclepius resurrected Glaucus, Apollo was furious (and unleashed a massacre).
For the record, Hippocrates—the author of The Epidemics, probably history’s first epidemiologist, and the one behind a certain oath (ὠφελέειν, ἢ μὴ βλάπτειν, that is, primum non nocere)—was a priest of Asclepius. Centuries later, Galen was also a therapeutḗs in an Asclepeion. Jumping forward a thousand years, what about the Knights of the Hospital (Hospitallers), later of Rhodes, then Malta? They still exist in their Maltese version as a healthcare-oriented NGO. Their patron saint, Saint Ubaldesca (Ubaldesca Taccini, a very Pisan name with Lombard echoes), was known for caring for the sick.
Saint Ubaldesca is often depicted wearing the livery of the Order.
In short, medicine as religion/magic, and doctors as priests, is nothing new. It’s ancient history, which theoretically should’ve been shelved around the 7th century—and in practice, it was. Until the day before yesterday. Good times, our times, with their overwhelming nostalgia for the Ancien Régime.
But if we really want to play on the archetypal level—as we've seen—some have one snake on the staff, and some have two…
Let’s return to The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony:
There is a nostalgia among the sovereign gods, urging them to restore the state of the first among them, Phanes.
For Zeus, the nostalgia for Phanes took shape in the figure of the serpent.
Only Zeus could remember the vision of the two entwined serpents before the world existed.
And Phanes had appeared from the coils of a serpent.
When Zeus expelled the world from his heart, he felt the desire to unite with his mother.
That desire was moved by a remote memory.
The mother fled, and Zeus never tired of chasing her.
Eventually, Rhea Demeter turned into a serpent.
Then Zeus too became a serpent, approached his mother, and pressed his coils against hers in a Heraclean knot—the very same knot formed by the two serpents on Hermes’s Caduceus.
Is the meaning of the two serpents entwined around the Caduceus clearer now? It’s essentially yin and yang. Personally, I remember an Irish Christian stele—the “Hand of God” (Dublin Museum)—with two serpents, one black and one white, coiled around a forearm with an open hand inscribed in a solar disk. A more explicit image than a thousand words.
In Manetho’s Egypt, Hermes and Thoth had become completely merged: Thoth, the ibis-headed god, inventor of writing, geometry, and mathematics, patron of scribes and scribe himself to the great god Ra or Osiris. Hermes/Thoth merges with Hermes Trismegistus, “thrice great,” to whom the Corpus Hermeticum is attributed—a collection of texts regarded by some as a Hellenistic philosophical current, by others as part of Gnosticism, hence a religion (cf. Doresse and Puech, https://books.google.nl/books/about/Gnosticismo_e_manicheismo.html?id=qFl8mgEACAAJ&redir_esc=y).
But that’s not all. The Emerald Tablet is also attributed to Hermes Trismegistus:
Verum, sine mendacio, certum et verissimum:
Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius,
Et quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius:
Ad perpetranda miracula rei unius.
(True, without falsehood, certain and most true:
That which is below is like that which is above,
And that which is above is like that which is below,
To accomplish the miracle of the One Thing.)
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavola_di_smeraldo
The Emerald Tablet is the cornerstone of alchemy—and what scientific discipline arose from alchemy?
We could go on. I’ve lost count of how many times on social media, under the banner of “science,” I’ve heard people parrot “the dose makes the poison”—sola dosis venenum facit. And who are we talking about? Paracelsus, the father of spagyrics—today labeled a pseudoscience, yet also the mother of part of modern pharmaceutical chemistry (isolation of alkaloids and essential oils). And Paracelsus belongs in the “History of Alchemy” section. So in a way, the Caduceus on the signs of Italian pharmacies is justified. That said… Has anyone ever been outraged at the “unscientific” nature of the Caduceus? I don’t recall anyone idiotic enough to propose replacing it with the DNA double helix.
Okay, the “one serpent vs. two” thing I played for laughs. But one fact remains—not proportional to the number of serpents: the symbolic weight of healing, medicine, and care for the sick is immense. It’s easy to understand the modern overlap of realms: religion/science, sacred/profane.
Today I would say it’s deeply dishonest to lean heavily (and politically) on this overlap, whether consciously or not. Sure, many have played that game in the name of science, but it was the medical profession that overwhelmingly played it. And I know full well that there are physicians who do research (I’ve worked with some). A few of them tried to speak up during the pandemic, even on social media. They weren’t ignored or welcomed—they were lumped in with antivaxxers and publicly smeared (see https://ilchimicoscettico.blogspot.com/2022/02/con-quella-faccia-li.html). But I think the point is clear enough. It wasn’t love of science motivating the attacks, but pure zealot-like fanaticism (not just from random people, but also from minor academics who, who knows, perhaps sought some personal redemption online).
Only by removing the archetypal burden I’ve described could one hope for a truly scientific public discourse in medicine—if that’s even possible. That archetypal burden remains an indispensable asset for many—and one that was heavily exploited at the height of its usability and ambiguity: during an epidemic. An epidemic that, let us remember, was a political event with medical implications. For the medical class, playing the priestly class card was, and is, easy—given such a background. Easy and effective. But the fact that all this came wrapped in talk of the scientific method—by practitioners of a discipline that is not a science—is at best grotesque. Grotesque and harmful, because by now, “science” in public discourse is practically synonymous with magical thinking. And thus, any genuine secularism has mostly been branded as heresy.
Note: Roberto Calasso (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Calasso), besides retelling Greek mythology like no one else, was the patron of Adelphi. Adelphi, as it was from the 1980s to the ’90s, was a publishing house unlike any other in Italy. Today, it’s more or less just another publisher, and its history lives on only in its catalog. But my adolescence and youth were marked by books from Adelphi—from The Birth of Philosophy by Giorgio Colli to Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, to The Gay Science by Nietzsche. Those were more civilized times.
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