What Happened When You Got Sick in Ancient Athens?

It's late summer, 415 BC, two hours before dawn, in the potters' quarter of Athens. A twenty-four-year-old potter we'll call Eudikos is shaking with fever. His wife Philinna holds a lamp over his face, and forty cups sit drying in the yard. There's no thermometer, no pharmacy, no hospital and no idea of germs. This film asks who was going to keep him alive between tonight and the ninth day, and what each of them was actually doing. We follow him through the kitchen, the Koan doctor's workshop in the agora, and the god Asclepius on the south slope of the Acropolis. Along the way we meet barley water, a bronze cup that drinks blood, a casebook full of dying patients, a snake, a clay ear and a silver pig. The usual story sets Hippocrates against the temple and picks a winner. The sources show something different. The doctors and the priests shared a god, and families tried both in the same week. The woman holding the lamp did most of the work and left nothing in writing. By the end there is one job all of these did, and it isn't the one the word medicine brings to mind. Then there's a question for you: with one choice you can afford, who do you send for?