The sanctuaries of Asklepios were the great centres of Greek and Roman healing, and the treatment there was both mental and physical. The temples were generally built in charming localities, where everything was peace and loveliness; the patients lay in beds in beautiful colonnades, and to them, last thing at night, priests delivered restful and touching services; when sleep came upon them they dreamt, and the dreams were looked upon as the voice of God; they followed His instructions and were cured. They were not cured, however, if they had cancer. One Ælius Aristides has left us a vivid--and unconsciously amusing--account of his adventures in search of health; he seems to have been a neurotic man who ultimately developed into a first-class neurasthenic. To him his beloved god was indeed a trial, as no doubt Aristides himself was to his more earthly physicians. He would sit surrounded by his friends, to whom he would pour out his woes in true neurasthenic style. Aristides seems never to have been truly happy unless he was talking about his ailments, and he loyally followed any suggestion for treatment if only he could persuade himself that it came from the beloved Asklepios. The god would send him a vision, that ordered him to bathe three times in icy water when fevered, and afterwards to run a mile in the teeth of a north-east wind--and the north-easters in the Troad can be bitter indeed; very different from the urbane and gentle breath that spreads so delicious a languor over the summer of Sydney! This behest the much-tried man of faith would dutifully perform, accompanied by a running bodyguard of doctors and nurses marvelling at his endurance and the inscrutable wisdom of the god, though they expected, and no doubt in their inmost hearts hoped, that their long-suffering patient would drop dead from exhaustion. There were real doctors at these shrines besides priests. The doctors seem to have been much the same kind of inquisitive and benevolent persons as we are to-day; some of them were paid to attend the poor without fee. The nurses were both male and female, and appear to have been most immoral people. Aristides was the wonder of his age; his fame spread from land to land, and it is marvellous that he neither succumbed to his heroic treatment nor lost his faith in the divine being that subjected him to such torment. Both facts are perhaps characteristic of mankind. The manner of his end I do not know.