Asclepius's Family and the Myth of His Origin

Asclepius was born to Apollo and the mortal woman Coronis, who was killed, in most versions by Apollo or Artemis, after being unfaithful to the god while pregnant; the infant was rescued from his dying mother's funeral pyre and given to the centaur Chiron, already established in Greek myth as the wisest teacher of medicine and other arts, who trained him in healing to a level that eventually let him raise the dead, an achievement that so upset the boundary between mortality and immortality that Zeus killed Asclepius with a thunderbolt to restore the natural order. His cult gave him a family whose names encode aspects of health itself: his sons Machaon and Podalirius appear in the Iliad as healer warriors serving at Troy, and his daughters Hygieia and Panacea personify health and universal cure respectively, with Iaso and Aceso, personifying recuperation and the healing process, named in some sources as further daughters. The single snake entwined staff associated with Asclepius is frequently confused in modern commercial and even some medical branding with the unrelated two snake, winged staff called the caduceus, an attribute that belongs to Hermes rather than to any healing god and carries no ancient medical association at all.