22. Greek Medicine

By December, practically everyone who still enjoyed wandering in the freezing Minced Forest had caught a bad cold.

The Roman ghost, Nauta, who was usually a shade of acquamarine blue like the waters he had drowned in when living, now sported a nose as red as a boiled lobster. But he never lost his good humor and when Alpin rudely asked what he meant to do about it, got to telling him stories about ancient Greek medicine.

He said the Greek god of medicine was a fellow named Asclepius. He and his children were quite close and liked to work as a team. Two of his daughters were particularly famous. Higieia taught people how to prevent disease by being clean and eating right. Panacea was the goddess of pharmacy. She produced the medicines that cured people’s ills. Asclepius’s youngest child was a little boy called Telesphorus. As god of convalescence, Telesphorus was always all bundled up in clothes, wearing a sort of overcoat, and with his head well covered by a hood. This was so people would follow his example and not take chances but be very careful  what they did while recovering from an illness so they would not relapse. 

Nauta told Alpin that when the Greeks were seriously ill they could go to places called asclepieions. These were part hospitals and part sanctuaries. There, people would pray to be cured and at the same time receive treatment from physicians. Since many of these people came from very far away, there were communal dormitories were they could spend the night. Wandering loose about the asclepieions were tame snakes and dogs. The snakes’ venom was used to make medicine and the dogs were allowed to lick the wounds of patients because it was believed this would help them heal. Nauta also said the cock was Asclepius’s favorite animal, and is a symbol used by physicians because it reminded Asclepius of his father, Apollo, god of the sun.

Alpin got all excited when he heard about the asclepieions and demanded to be taken directly to one. He wanted to play with the snakes and the doggies and try Panacea’s medicines to see if they really did taste as awful as they sounded.

To keep him from pestering them to take him to one, Michael, who also had a cold, sent Alpin on an errand. He said fairyland’s Panacea was a Welsh apothecary named Henbeddestyr Parry. And off to see him went Alpin with a list of stuff to be acquired at the man’s pharmacy.