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(More customer reviews)Two serpents twined about a staff, the Caduceus, is now very widely accepted as the symbol of medicine. Dr Friedlander traced the provenance and evolution of the symbol back through the ancient mythologies in which it was born, disentangling its usage and the line of its development from that of the similar, single serpent wound on the Staff of Aesculapius. It emerges as more than a little astonishing, at least to me, that the two symbols retained through more than two millennia of common usage their distinct and different identities. The Caduceus had nothing to do with health, healing or medical arts in all that time, while the Staff of Aesculapius clearly did. Then in the first quarter of our own century the United States Army, resolute in error as armies tend to be, adopted the Caduceus as the insignia of its newly created medical arm. The power of the military's influence displaced the Aesculapian Staff from its mythic place altogether, and substituted the Caduceus to be the new symbol of medicine. This was a bit of a perversion: through centuries it had been the sign of a sly trickster and messenger. Trust the military to mess things up. Myths encapsulate our values, pervade our language and enrich its meaning. I suppose it's too much to hope we might treat them with respect for their origins. But this fascinating, short book, meticulously documented, may at least set us straight on where the Caduceus came from, before we forget the ancient god of healing and his one-serpent staff. In our age graphical symmetry ranks well above fidelity to tradition, and extinguished gods are pretty much all the same.
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The Caduceus, two entwined snakes set upon a rod, was the ancient symbol of Hermes, the Greek god of merchants. Today, it is a common and popular symbol of the medical and allied professions. This book traces the use of the caduceus symbol and answers the question of how it came to be the symbol of medicine. The work begins with a discussion of the symbol's origin as the magic wand of Hermes/Mercury, the Greco-Roman messenger of the gods, and the later identification of Hermes with the Egyptian god Thoth, whose characteristics included wisdom and eloquence. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Friedlander says, the caduceus was associated with wise and eloquent individuals, including some physicians. However, in the early 19th century it was adopted by a medical publisher as a sign, not that he published medical books, but that he was a commercial deliverer of information. Friedlander goes on to indicate that in 1902 the sign was adopted by the U.S. Army as the insignia of its Medical Department. The sign became widely recognized after the exposure it had during World War I. It became frequently used and, once popular, bred popularity. This book will be of interest to those in medical fields, medical historians, and those interested in symbology and iconology.
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