Object Description
A typed ten paged document stapled together and is composed out of paper and black ink. The document, assumed lecture paper, is broken down into four paragraphs. Located at the top center of the page is the number -6-. The document reads, "many Greek travelers before Strabo and Herodotus must have brought home tales of what they had seen and heard in Egypt. From the rational standpoint, Steuer and Saunders have shown how the comprehensive Egyptian theory of disease, as expressed in the concept of the putrefactive principle, whd, influenced Knidian medical thought. This may even have stimulated the Hippocratic writers at Kos. My own studies convince me that the extensive drug lore of the Egyptians, are expressed in their cook-book formularies, was taken over and adapted widely by the classical Greek writers, to culminate in reorganized codification by Dioskorides and Galen at the beginning of our era. The Egyptian influence on Greek popular beliefs may have been equally as significant for the consolidation of the Asklepian myth. Both at the temples of Imhotep and of Asklepios certain similar features were characteristic: (1) associated of snakes with the healing-god; (2) the "temple-sleep" or incubation, in which the sick person would dream of a visit from the healing-god, with the dream interpreted by the priests, and (3) the offering of ex-votoes by those who felt they had been healed by the magic of the god. The conventionalized worship of Imhotep in Egypt preceded by many centuries the consolidation of the worship Asklepios in Greece in the 5th Century B.C., but the similarity of these three features in both the worship of Imhotep and of Asklepios indicates more than mere coincidence of any one. Doddas stresses the essentially religious experience in the temple sleep . It involved a deep faith on the part of the sick person. This subjective feeling must have been a considerable factor in the efficacy of the heeling ritual, as has now been shown as well experimentally by Beecher in what is called the" […]
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Citation
Other Documents, National Hellenic Museum, https://collections.nationalhellenicmuseum.org/Detail/objects/13788. Accessed 08/20/26.