ABSTRACT
Medical dreams are diagnostic or prognostic, and almost any dream may inform or predict something about the body and its diseases. The Hippocratic Corpus, as we have seen, has a good deal to say about dreams and their relationship to the practice of healing. In Regimen in Acute Diseases, the Hippocratic author reports that medicine has fallen into ill repute because laymen interpret differences of medical opinion as an indication that medicine is as speculative and imprecise as divination. Hippocratic authors, focused on dreams as a point of differentiation between their prognostic art and mantik. Prognosis brought the physicians art perilously close to that of diviner, and so justifying and explaining medical. Epiphany dreams about the body, its maladies, and their cures characterized the cult of Asclepius. It is not necessary to imagine, as scholars once did, that the great centres of the cult at Epidaurus, Kos, Lebena, and elsewhere were homes of a temple medicine.
