Would you fly to Türkiye to do a hair transplant or would you hike up to a natural thermal spring for a therapeutic bath? Medical tourism may seem like a modern trend, but for thousands of years people have traveled long distances to receive medical care. In ancient greece and Rome, the sick made pilgrimages to special shrines, called asclepieion, dedicated to the demigod physician Asclepius (or Aescupale), in the hope of finding a cure.
The first asclepieion appeared in ancient Greece around 500 BC. Over the following centuries, hundreds more appeared on Greek territory and on the Italian peninsula. Pilgrims sought medical care in asclepieions for a wide range of problems, such as migraines, blindness and pregnancy complications.
The treatments they received combined spirituality and medicine and may seem unorthodox today. But the bulk of the pilgrims’ treatment involved sleeping at the sacred site in the hope of dreaming of Asclepius, who was believed to have healing powers or would provide advice to cure their illnesses.
One of the most famous pilgrims to the Asclepieion is Aelius Aristides, a Greek orator from the second century A.D. When he became too ill to give speeches, Aristides went to the Asclepieion at Pergamum.
Like many ancient accounts of illness, it is indeed not really possible for modern scholars to diagnose the illness Aristides suffered from.It is known, however, that he remained in Pergamum for two years, an unusually long period, and that he received numerous treatments, some based on the interpretation of dreams.
One of Aristides’ dreams in the sanctuary led to him receiving a honey enema. “He saw a statuette of the goddess Athena, goddess of wisdom,” explains Petsalis-Diomidis. Athena was also the tutelary goddess of the city of Athens, in the region of Attica, a region famous for its honey. For Aristides, the meaning of this dream was obvious: “It promptly jumped out at me,” he wrote, “to do an enema of Attic honey.” (But of course!)
Aristides’ other dream-based treatments included physical exercise,cold water baths,ingestion,and elimination of certain foods. Pilgrims were also sometimes prescribed medicinal herbs or medicines, bathing in thermal springs, or participation in spiritually significant rituals.Aristides found a therapeutic side to composing speeches during his stay in the asclepieion, although he was too ill to deliver them.
Today, we would describe this kind of care as “holistic,” says Helena C. Maltezou, director of research, studies, and documentation at Greece’s National Public Health Association, and co-author of the study on milkweed as precursors of medica