Entering upon one of these temple treatments is, in short anything but surrendering oneself to unmitigated quackery.  Probably a large proportion of the former patients have recovered; and they have testified their gratitude by hanging around the shrine little votive tablets,[$] usually pictures of the diseased parts now happily healed, or, for internal maladies, a written statement of the nature of the disease.  This is naturally very encouraging to later patients:  they gain confidence knowing that many cases similar to their own have been thus cured.

[*]The most famous was at Epidaurus, where the Asclepius cult seems to have been especially localized.

[+]The “healing sleep” employed at these temples is described, in a kind of blasphemous parody, in Aristophanes’s “Plutus.” (Significant passages are quoted in Davis’s “Readings in Ancient History,” vol.  I, pp. 258-261.)

[$]Somewhat as in the various Catholic pilgrimage shrines (e.g.  Lourdes) to-day.

These visits to the healing temples are, however, expensive:  not everybody has entire faith in them; for many lesser ills also they are wholly unnecessary.  Let us look, then, at the regular physicians.

65.  An Athenian Physician’s Office.—­There are salaried public medical officers in Athens, and something like a public dispensary where free treatment is given citizens in simple cases; but the average man seems to prefer his own doctor.[*] We may enter the office of Menon, a “regular private practitioner,” and look about us.  The office itself is a mere open shop in the front of a house near the Agora; and, like a barber’s shop is something of a general lounging place.  In the rear one or two young disciples (doctors in embryo) and a couple of slaves are pounding up drugs in mortars.  There are numbers of bags of dried herbs and little glass flasks hanging on the walls.  Near the entrance is a statue of Asclepius the Healer, and also of the great human founder of the real medical science among the Greeks—­Hippocrates.

[*]We know comparatively little of these public physicians; probably they were mainly concerned with the health of the army and naval force, the prevention of epidemics, etc.

Menon himself is just preparing to go out on his professional calls.  He is a handsome man in the prime of his life, and takes great pains with his personal appearance.  His himation is carefully draped.  His finger rings have excellent cameos.  His beard has been neatly trimmed, and he has just bathed and scented himself with delicate Assyrian nard.  He will gladly tell you that he is in no wise a fop, but that it is absolutely necessary to produce a pleasant personal impression upon his fastidious, irritable patients.  Menon himself claims to have been a personal pupil of the great Hippocrates,[*] and about every other reputable Greek physician will make the same claim.  He has studied more or less in a temple of Asclepius, and perhaps has been a member of the medical staff thereto attached.  He has also become a member of the Hippocratic brotherhood, a semi-secret organization, associated with the Asclepius cult, and cheerfully cherishing the dignity of the profession and the secret arts of the guild.