times,
the employment of verbal charms, curative spells, and formulas, was
believed to enhance the therapeutic virtues of medicines. No remedy, we
are told, was administered without mysterious ceremony and incantation.

According to Suidas, a Greek lexicographer, supposed to have lived in
the tenth century, the method of curing diseases by the repetition of
certain words had been practised ever since the time of the mythological
King Minos, of Crete. Indeed, among the peoples of antiquity, the
science of therapeutics was largely of a theurgic or supernatural
character, and Sibylline verses were in great repute. In this connection
it is interesting to note that, according to one authority, the word
carminative, a remedy which relieves pain "like a charm," is derived
from the Latin _carminare_, to use incantations.

Words of encouragement and a cheerful mien are good therapeutic agents;
and the physician of Plato's day, we are told, sometimes took an orator
along with him, in his visits to Grecian households, to persuade his
patients to take medicines.[122:2] Such an expedient may have been
warranted in those days, but it is of course wholly unnecessary in this
age of palatable elixirs and chocolate-coated tablets.

Alexander of Tralles, a Greek physician of the sixth century,
recommended a verse of Homer for the cure of colic. In our advanced
stage of culture, we should hardly be content with such a carminative,
but should rather employ one of the modern aromatic remedies of the
pharmacopoeia. In the classic age, however, as well as at later
epochs, the use of verbal charms for the cure of disease was forbidden
under severe penalties. The case is recorded of a woman of Achaia, who
was stoned to death for attempting to cure a fever by the repetition of
spells. This was in the fourth century, during the reign of
Valentinian.[123:1]

The Greeks invoked Asklepios, the god of Medicine, and his daughters
Hygeia, the goddess of Health, and Panacea, the All-Healer, who
personified attributes of their father. Apollo, too, under the title of
Paean, was worshipped as a health-deity and physician of the gods. He was
addressed both as a healer and destroyer; as one who inflicted diseases,
but who likewise vouchsafed remedies for their cure. But there appears
to have been no incompatibility between the offering of prayers to these
heathen deities, and the use of magical spells, formulas and verses. For
religion, the healing art, a