The idea of the serpent twined round the rod of Æsculapius is that “as sickness comes from him, from him too must or may come the healing.”[332] The knots on the staff are supposed to symbolize the many knotty points which arise in the practice of physic.
MINERVA was the patroness of all the arts and trades; at her festivals she was invoked by all who desired to distinguish themselves in medicine, as well as by the patients whom they failed to cure. As the goddess of intelligence and inventiveness, she was the Greek patroness of physicians, and was the same deity as Pallas Athene, who bestows health and keeps off sickness.
ARTEMIS, or DIANA, as the Romans called the Greek goddess, was a deity who, inviolate and vigorous herself, granted health and strength to others. She was the sister of Apollo, and though a dispenser of life could, like her brother, send death and disease amongst men and animals. Sudden deaths, especially amongst women, were described as the effect of her arrows. She was θεὰ σώτειρα, who assuaged the sufferings of mortals. When Æneas was wounded, she healed him in the temple of Apollo.[333] Yet Artemis ταυροπόλος produced madness in the minds of men.[334]
She was the Cretan Diktynna, and that goddess wore a wreath of the magic plant _diktamnon_ or _dictamnus_, called by us _dittany_ (_dictamnus ruber_, or _albus_); it grows in abundance on Mounts _Dicté_ and Ida in Crete.
The Cretan goddess BRITOMARTIS was sometimes identified with Artemis. She too was a goddess of health as also of birth, and was supposed to dispense happiness to mortals.
BACCHUS, or, as he was called by the Greeks, DIONYSUS, as the god of wine, and an inspired and an inspiring deity, who revealed the future by oracles, cured diseases by discovering to sufferers in their dreams their appropriate remedies. The prophet, the priest, and the physician are so often blended in one in the early history of civilization, that the same ideas naturally clustered round Bacchus as around Apollo, and other great benefactors of mankind. The giver of vines and wine was the dispenser of the animating, exalting, intoxicating powers of nature. As wine restores the flagging energies of the body and mind, and seems to have the power of calling back to life the departing spirit, and inspiring the languishing vitality of man, Bacchus would naturally enough be a god of medicine. The intoxicating properties of wine would be connected with inspiration, and so Bacchus had a share in the oracles of Delphi and Amphicleia. He was invoked as a θεὸς σωτήρ against raging diseases.