From left to right: The Acslepions, ruins of the Acslepions, and dream incubation chamber.
Ancient peoples believed that magic and spiritual beliefs played a big part in if a person was healthy or not. In primitive societies like Ancient Greece, the roles of doctor and priest were often united in the same person. Ancient Greek medicine displays the coexestince of medicine and religion. The aim of the doctors in Greece was to ward off the evil spirits causing the person illness. Medicine and Religion became intertwined in homeric times, where temples gradually became established devoted to medicine. Healing sanctuaries called Asclepions, dedicated to the god of medicine, became established throughout Greece. In these sanctuaries, priest-physicians practiced a kind of spiritual healing, based around dream therapy on patients who came seeking a healing treatment from the Divine Physician. The preliminary treatment for admission into the Asclepions was purification (Katharsis) which included several cleansing baths accompanied by a special diet which lasted for several days. The patient was then admitted into the sanctuary to participate in the Asclepian Rituals. Offerings were made, usually in the form of gold or silver. Sometimes, marble sculptures of the body part to be healed were offered. The priest then invoked prayers to the patient, and included stories of previous cures, to put him/her in a positive frame of mind. The supplicant (person who asks something in a respectful way from a god) next entered the Abatonor dream incubation chamber. If the supplicant was lucky, he would receive a personal visitation from the Divine Physician himself, who would either heal the person directly, or tell him what to do to cure his illness or disease. Other dreams were less direct, and more symbolic. The priest would then decipher the dream, according to the patient’s account of it. The treatment would then be carried out, according to the dreams.