Pilgrims travelling to Epidaurus, the most prominent of several Asclepius sanctuaries that also included Kos and Pergamon, underwent purification and sacrifice before sleeping in a special building, the abaton, in hope of a dream in which the god himself would appear, offer a diagnosis, perform a cure directly or instruct the sleeper in a remedy to carry out afterward. Non-venomous snakes were kept within the sanctuary grounds and were understood as embodiments or agents of the god's healing presence, moving freely among those sleeping in the abaton, an unusual degree of comfort with a living animal inside a space otherwise organized around ritual purity.
Inscribed stone stelae found at Epidaurus, known as the iamata, record specific first person style testimonies of pilgrims describing the ailments they arrived with and the cures they received, a form of temple publicity that functioned much like a public record of results meant to reassure and attract further visitors, and which gives modern historians of ancient medicine an unusually direct, if obviously self selected, body of evidence for how the sanctuary presented its own success. The iamata record a wide range of complaints, from blindness and paralysis to infertility and even, in a few entries, conditions modern readers would class as psychological rather than physical, and several inscriptions include a sceptical visitor whose doubt is dramatized and then overturned by the cure, a narrative device the sanctuary's own priests likely had a hand in shaping for exactly this persuasive effect.