Apollo and Asclepius

Meaning

Antiquity is said to have represented Apollo as inventor and superintendent of medicine, passing the art to his son Esculape under a duty of secrecy. The prefatory wording that antiquity wished to persuade us keeps this within a received mythic account. The terms sacrilegious and impious condemn disclosure within that account of sacred inheritance; they are not a rule requiring modern medical knowledge to be concealed. Nuysement uses the story to establish medicine’s dignity and precious transmission, then brings it into his claim that a single hidden philosophy underlies differently named learned traditions.