An example of caduceus is the winged staff carried by Mercury, the messenger god. An example of caduceus is the symbol of the medical profession. Striding back to the kitchen, he deliberately removed the caduceus magnet and centered the picture on the refrigerator door — eye level. These include things like embroidery on the chest, left or right, with up to three lines of text and an emblem such as the medical caduceus.
All rights reserved. Romney even forgot that he had forgotten the bill with the golden caduceus. The name of Hermes was chosen because of the supposed magical powers of the god of the caduceus. I don't know whether anyone has ever remarked that the caduceus of Mercury represents two serpents coupled. She holds in her left hand the caduceus , the winged rod of Mercury, in her right a miniature ship. And one of them had a petasus and a golden caduceus , and the other had a trumpet.
It was much later when the big caduceus set into the sidewalk snapped him back to awareness of where he'd traveled. New Word List Word List.
Zeus thereupon struck Asklepios dead with a thunderbolt. As the legend of the demi-god grew, Asklepian temples were built throughout the ancient world. The temples became major health centers. All statues of Asklepios depict him as a kindly looking bearded man leaning on a rough-hewn staff entwined by a single serpent.
The temples were extremely popular and Asklepios was worshiped by every echelon of society in the Greco-Roman world. At the time of the great plague Sophicles pushed to establish an Asklepian temple in Athens. He was saved by an Asklepian physician and in gratitude dedicated his spear and breastplate to Asclepios. Galen, the best known physician of the Roman era CE considered himself a follower of Asklepios. Asklepian popularity peaked in the 3 rd century AD with over temples scattered throughout the ancient world from Scotland in the north to Egypt in the south and from Spain in the west to Persia Iran in the east.
After Constantine the Great made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4 th century AD, paganism and the cult of Asclepios gradually declined.
The final blow was an earthquake that destroyed the center at Cos, Hippocrates birthplace, in CE. Subsequently, many of the Asklepian temples were converted into Christian centers. Hygieia or Roman Salus , his daughter, survived the fall of paganism into the Christian era and became synonymous with the concept of health and well-being. Hippocrates transcended his beginnings as an Asklepian priest and he and his followers observed and recorded descriptions of disease that survive to this day.
They removed the concept of illness from superstition and based it upon natural causes. The Hippocratic Oath still given at many medical school graduation ceremonies today begins:. I swear by Apollo the physician, and Asklepios, and Hygea and Panacea, and all the gods and goddesses…. As you can see there is a long history and tradition of the use of the Staff of Asklepios to represent physicians—pushing years.
Now, another important figure in the ancient world was Hermes Mercury — one of the twelve Olympian gods. He was quite a precocious child. By noon on the day of his birth he was playing a lyre he had fashioned out of a tortoise shell.
Later in the day he became hungry and stole fifty cattle from his half-brother, Apollo, to cook for an afternoon snack. In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes his mother Maia relates:.
Among the immortal gods you will be ever known as the Prince of Thieves. You will wander under the earth where you will be the leader of the tiny ones the dead. Like Apollo, Hermes had many jobs. In the Odyssey he escorted the slain suitors of Penelope to the underworld, the realm of the god Hades Pluto. Hermes was also the God of Commerce and Trade.
He was the God of Thieves. Apollo gave him a staff to use in his important role as a herald, the messenger of the gods. According to fable he used the staff to break up two snakes fighting and they entwined themselves about the staff in peace—and thus became a permanent part of his symbol, the Caduceus. Hermes was the god who organized the beauty contest between Helen and Aphrodite Venus that set off the Trojan War. Today, the Caduceus is often used as a symbol of medicine in place of the Staff of Asklepios.
In ancient times a Greek or Roman would have considered such confusion to be heresy! Knowing the history of the symbols, it is difficult to see how this confusion occurred. Johann Froben in Basel, Switzerland, and his son used it extensively. Other printers did so as well. Other British medical publishers did not follow suit, but the practice was widely adopted by medical publishers in the United States.
The caduceus was thus inadvertently connected in the minds of some physicians with medicine. In Roman times the Caduceus was used as a symbol of peace or neutrality in battle. A messenger would display this sign and could then deliver a message to the enemy without being assaulted, much as a white flag of truce is used today.
In US Army stewards first used the Caduceus as part of their insignia. Stretcher-bearers could enter the field of battle with this symbol of non-combatant status, the Caduceus, and not get shot. The Caduceus also was incorporated in medals commemorating many important peace treaties such as the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War in
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