Paper long abstract:

Medicine has been considered a technè since Antiquity. Ancient physicians agreed that medicine was invented by gods before being passed down to men: the first link in this transmission chain would be the centaur Chiron, who taught Asclepius pharmacopoeia and surgery: the Hippocratides medical dynasty claims this prestigious ancestry to legitimize its knowledge and skills. Thus, Asclepius is thought of as the divine ancestor of physicians, and even as a divine physician. Indeed, his art is similar to mortal physicians’: healing occurs through physical contact during incubation, and the healing narratives of the Asclepieia use the same technical vocabulary as in the Hippocratic corpus. Technical and family filiation is accompanied by collective and individual devotion, making Asclepius the divine model of human physicians.

Asclepius is also the heir of another god who contributes to the construction of his technical identity: his father, Apollo, who is a healing deity and not a medical one, because he is not a practitioner, technitès, as Asclepius is. It thus seems that Asclepius, son of Apollo and disciple of Chiron, is at the same time the heir of Chiron’s technical skills, which is manifested through his pattern of interaction with incubants, and of Apollo’s dynamis, making him a divine puissance with supra-human medical ability.

I would like to study Asclepius’ technical identity by distinguishing medical deities from healing deities, similar in terms of champ d’action but distinct in terms of modes d’action. I will argue that Asclepius’ accession from heroic status to divine status, in Greece during the 5th century, must be placed in the socio-historical context of the emergence of Hippocratic medicine. Thus, at the turn of the classical period, Apollo, healing god, gave way to Asclepius, medical god, as the preferred interlocutor of the sick and wounded.