The worship of Asclepius or Æsculapius is so closely associated with the practice of Greek medicine that it is impossible to understand the one without knowing something of the other. Sick persons made pilgrimages to the temples of the god of healing, just as now they go to Lourdes, St. Winifred’s Well, or other famous Christian shrines for the recovery of their health. After prayers to the god, ablutions, and sacrifices, the patient was put to sleep on the skin of the animal offered at the altar, or at the foot of the statue of the divinity, while the priests performed their sacred rites. In his sleep he would have pointed out to him in a dream what he ought to do for the recovery of his health. Sometimes the appropriate medicine would be suggested, but more commonly rules of conduct and diet would suffice. When the cure took place, which very frequently happened by suggestion as in modern hypnotism, and by the stimulus to the nervous system consequent upon the journey, and the hope excited in the patient, a record of the case and the cure was carved on the temple walls. Thus were recorded the first histories of cases, and their study afforded the most valuable treatises on the healing art to the physicians who studied them. The priests of Æsculapius were sometimes called Asclepiads, but they did not themselves act as physicians, nor were they the actual founders of Greek medicine. The true Asclepiads were healers and not priests. Anathemata (ἀνάθεμα, anything offered up) were offerings of models in gold, silver, etc., of diseased legs, feet, etc., or of deformed limbs consecrated to the gods in the temples by the devotion of the patients who had received benefit from the prayers to the deities who were worshipped therein. The priests of the temples sold these again and again to fresh patients. THE EARLY IONIC PHILOSOPHERS. The various schools of Greek philosophy were intimately associated with the study of medicine. They endeavoured to fathom the mystery of life, and the relationship of the visible order of things to the unseen world. The philosophers were therefore not only physicists, but metaphysicians, and the unhappy science of medicine, a homeless wanderer, had to shelter herself now with the natural philosophers and again with the metaphysicians. Probably the philosophers never really practised physic, but merely speculated about it, as did Plato. A brief notice of the various philosophers of the Ionic, Italian, Eleatic, and Materialistic schools who were more or less associated with the study of medicine must suffice as an introduction to Greek medicine proper, which had its origin with Hippocrates.