The Doctors

In the ancient world, Asklepios’s magic was often reserved for the chronically ill and incurable. But if you woke up one morning with a fever and achy joints, you went to see a doctor (iatros).

One of the earliest doctors was Democedes of Croton, in southeastern Italy, where the sixth-century B.C. Greek philosopher Pythagoras established his community. According to Herodotus, Democedes, the son of a priest of Asklepios, was the “best physician of his day”; he even healed the Persian Achaemenid king Darius I (522–486 B.C.) of a sprained ankle.

Another sixth-century B.C. doctor from Croton, and a member of Pythagoras’s cult, was a man named Alcmaeon, who was the first doctor known to have performed dissections and who discovered the connection between the brain and the sense organs.