Would you fly to Turkey for a hair transplant or trek to a natural thermal spring for a therapeutic dip? Medical tourism may seem like a modern trend, but people have been traveling long distances to receive health care for thousands of years. In the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, ailing people made pilgrimages to special sanctuaries called asklepieia dedicated to the physician-demigod Asklepios (or Asclepius), in the hopes of finding healing.
The first asklepieion appeared in ancient Greece as early as 500 B.C. Over the next several centuries, hundreds of them began operating throughout ancient Greece and the Italian peninsula. Pilgrims sought treatment at asklepieia for a wide range of issues, including headaches, blindness, and pregnancy complications.
(Pilgrimages aren’t just spiritual anymore. They’re a workout.)
The treatments they received blended spirituality and medicine—and might seem more than a little unorthodox today. But the central part of each pilgrim’s treatment was sleeping at the sacred site with the hope they would dream of Asklepios, whom pilgrims believed could cure them or at the very least advise them on how to treat their illnesses.
To sleep, perchance to dream (of Asklepios)
One of the most famous asklepieion pilgrims is Aelius Aristides, a Greek orator from the second century A.D. When he became too ill to give speeches, Aristides traveled to the Asklepieion of Pergamon.
“He talks about feeling that his teeth are going to fall out, that his intestines are going to come out,” says Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis, a lecturer in classics at the University of St. Andrews and author of Truly Beyond Wonders: Aelius Aristides and the Cult of Asklepios. “He often says he can’t breathe.”
(These ancient Greek weapons were literally toxic.)
As with many historical accounts of illness, it’s not really possible for modern scholars to diagnose what Aristides was suffering from. But we do know that he stayed at Pergamon for two years—an unusually long amount of time—and received multiple treatments, some based on interpretations of his dreams.
One of Aristides’ dreams at the sanctuary led him to receive an enema of honey. “He sees a statuette of the goddess Athena, goddess of wisdom,” Petsalis-Diomidis says. Athena was also the patron goddess of Athens in Attica, a region famous for its honey. To Aristides, the dream’s meaning was obvious: “it immediately occurred to me,” he wrote, “to have an enema of Attic honey.” (Of course!)
Aristides’ other dream-based treatments included exercising, bathing in cold water, and eating and avoiding certain foods. Pilgrims might also receive herbs or medicine, bathe in thermal springs, and participate in spiritually significant rituals. Aristides found it therapeutic to compose speeches during his stay at the asklepieion, even if he was too ill to deliver them.
Today, we might describe this kind of care as “holistic,” says Helena C. Maltezou, director of research, studies, and documentation at Greece’s National Public Health Organization, and coauthor of a paper about asklepieia as forerunners of medical tourism.
To be fair to Aristides, recent studies have investigated whether honey enemas can treat acute pouchitis in humans and ulcerative colitis in rats (the human study never posted results, but the rat study found honey reduced colonic inflammation). However, there are many parts of the historical asklepieion experience that we can’t easily explain through a modern scientific lens.
Cures that strain credulity
Some of the events ancient sources describe taking place at asklepieia defy modern medical explanations.
At the Asklepieion of Epidaurus (now a UNESCO World Heritage site), ancient inscriptions detail the cures people received there. These include an unusual story about a woman named Cleo, whom the inscription says had been pregnant for five years. After sleeping at the sanctuary, Cleo reportedly woke up and gave birth to a son who was able to walk and wash himself.
(Armpit tweezers? These were the grooming habits of ancient Rome.)
There are also inscriptions at Epidaurus about people who were blind or had some visual impairment. In their dreams, Asklepios poured drugs into their eyes; and when they woke, they could see.
Other inscriptions report that snakes or dogs healed people at the sanctuary by licking the afflicted parts of their bodies. Why snakes, you might ask? The animal has long been associated with Asklepios, and ancient depictions of the god show him holding a staff with a snake curled around it.
Many other pilgrims reported dreams in which Asklepios performed surgery on them. There is some scholarly debate, however, as to whether surgery actually took place at asklepieia. Although archaeologists have discovered surgical tools at these sanctuaries, this may be because physicians dedicated their tools there, says Bronwen L. Wickkiser, ancient history professor at Hunter College, CUNY, and author of Asklepios, Medicine, and the Politics of Healing in Fifth-Century Greece: Between Craft and Cult.
It’s not clear how we should interpret these miraculous tales from a modern viewpoint—yet as Wickkiser likes to ask her students, “Do we have to?”
Regardless of what was actually going on at asklepieia, people believed in and sought out their services, and the network of healing sanctuaries lasted for hundreds of years. Their decline may have been linked to the spread of Christianity; however, as Wickkiser points out, there is one notable way in which their influence has continued.
“Here we are, 2,500 and more years later, and the staff and serpent of Asklepios is still the symbol of medicine to this day.”
