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Plate 1 A single snake coiled around a plain staff

Rod of Asclepius

A single snake coiled around a plain staff. It is the emblem of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, and the symbol of medicine used by the World Health Organization and the American Medical Association.

Symbols of medicine. Also called asclepian staff, medical snake symbol, rod of asclepius, what is the medical symbol called.

Meaning

In Greek myth Asclepius was a son of Apollo and a healer so successful that, as the World Health Organization retells the legend, Hades complained to Zeus, and Zeus killed him with a thunderbolt for fear he would make humans immortal. His statues show him with a staff and a snake. Pausanias, who saw the ivory and gold statue in his sanctuary at Epidaurus, describes the god seated and “grasping a staff”, his other hand held over the serpent’s head. The staff with one snake is the emblem of medicine today: the World Health Organization put it on its emblem in 1948, the American Medical Association has carried it on its logo since the early twentieth century, and it is on the Star of Life that marks American ambulances. Latin writers spelled the god’s name Aesculapius, so the emblem is also called the staff of Aesculapius.

Origin and history

The god’s sanctuaries were places the sick came to sleep. At Epidaurus, Pausanias wrote, the suppliants slept in a building facing the temple, and stone slabs in the precinct listed the men and women Asclepius had healed, each one’s illness and the cure; six slabs were still standing when he visited. He took the spread of the cult as proof that the god was born at Epidaurus, since the most famous sanctuaries of Asclepius were founded from there: a man healed at Epidaurus after a hunting sprain carried the cult to Pergamum. The snakes of the place, he added, were sacred to Asclepius, among them a yellowish kind that was tame with people.

A votive relief found in many fragments at a sanctuary of Asklepios, now in the Acropolis Museum, shows the scene the staff comes from. Asklepios leans on his staff with a snake coiled round it, his daughter Hygeia rests a hand on his shoulder, and a line of worshippers approaches behind a slave leading a pig for sacrifice. The museum suggests that the box a servant girl carries on her head held bedding for the patient’s night in the sanctuary.

The snake that came to Rome

Ovid tells in the Metamorphoses how the god came to Rome. A plague was wasting the city, and the oracle at Delphi told the Romans to fetch Apollo’s son from Epidaurus. The Epidaurians would not part with their god, but he appeared to one of the Romans in a dream, “holding a rustic staff in his left hand”, and told him to mark well “this serpent, which with its folds entwines around this staff”, because he would travel in that shape. He came as a snake larger than the one on the staff, and the island in the Tiber became his sanctuary. Stuart Tyson, writing in The Scientific Monthly in 1932, dates the embassy to 293 BC and the snake’s arrival to 291. Lee Schwamm, in the Journal of the American Heart Association in 2013, calls the sanctuary built on the Tiber island in 293 BC one of the first hospitals in the Western world.

Why a snake?

The ancient explanation, as the classicist James Frazer summarised it and Tyson quoted, is that the snake renews itself by sloughing off its skin, which made it the natural sign of healing. EMS.gov gives the same reading of the staff on the Star of Life: “the skin-shedding serpent indicating renewal”. Frazer went further and thought Asclepius had once been nothing more than a snake, later turned into a god in human form with a snake as his sign. Schwamm tells another story, in which snakes licked clean the young Aesculapius’s ears and taught him the secret knowledge that made him a healer. Not everyone takes him for a god in the first place: EMS.gov calls Asclepius “an ancient Greek physician deified as the god of medicine”.

What is the medical symbol called?

The one-snake staff is the rod of Asclepius. The World Health Organization describes the device on its emblem as “a staff with a snake coiling round it”, set above the United Nations symbol, and traces it to Asclepius, “whose cult involved the use of snakes”. The American Medical Association’s newspaper introduced a redesigned AMA logo in 2005 as another version of “the single snake of the Staff of Asclepius”. Tyson, citing an earlier article, wrote that the AMA had used the caduceus for a time and adopted its Aesculapian emblem in 1912, after considerable discussion. The Star of Life, which the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration adapted from the AMA’s medical identification symbol, carries the same staff and serpent.

Often confused with the caduceus

The number of snakes tells them apart. The rod of Asclepius has one snake on a plain or knotted staff and no wings; the Caduceus of Hermes has two snakes and is generally topped with wings. The mix-up is largely American. Schwamm writes that the rod is the predominant symbol of medicine in much of the world, while in the United States the caduceus became equally popular from the 1900s. He cites a 1990 survey of American organizations in which 62% of professional associations used the rod and 76% of commercial organizations used the caduceus. In 1932 Tyson asked thirty-one physicians what the healing god’s emblem was, and twenty-seven named the wand with two snakes. As far as he knew, he wrote, the confusion was confined to the United States.

Where you’ll see it today

whatdoesthissymbolmean.comStar of LifeThe Star of Life is the emblem of emergency medical services: a blue six-barred star with a white border and the staff of Asclepius, a snake coiled on a staff, in the centre. In the United States it is a registered certification mark of NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

See also

Bowl of Hygieia, Snake symbolism, Caduceus.

Sources

  1. Pausanias, Description of Greece, 2.27, Translated by W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod (Loeb Classical Library, 1918), Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, 2.27.2–3
  2. Pausanias, Description of Greece, 2.28, Translated by W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod (Loeb Classical Library, 1918), Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, 2.28.1
  3. Pausanias, Description of Greece, 2.26, Translated by W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod (Loeb Classical Library, 1918), Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, 2.26.8–9
  4. The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Books VIII–XV, Book IX, Fable I, translated by Henry T. Riley, with his notes, Project Gutenberg, Book XV, Fable VII
  5. Relief in the form of a small temple and portico (Acropolis Museum), Acropolis Museum, collection entry, Acropolis Museum, Description
  6. Logo (WHO publishing policies), World Health Organization, Logo and emblem
  7. The symbol for a new AMA: Medicine for the 21st century, Editorial, 20 June 2005, American Medical News (American Medical Association), Editorial
  8. EMS Star of Life, EMS.gov, Office of EMS, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Page text
  9. The Caduceus versus the Rod of Asclepius, David Price and Terry Reimer, 22 January 2020, National Museum of Civil War Medicine, Blog post
  10. When in Rome, Do Like the Romans: Certifying Stroke Centers With the Rod of Aesculapius or the Medical Caduceus of Hermes?, Lee H. Schwamm, Journal of the American Heart Association, 2013; 2: e000120, Journal of the American Heart Association (PubMed Central), Introduction
  11. The Caduceus, by Stuart L. Tyson, The Scientific Monthly, vol. 34, no. 6 (June 1932), pp. 492–498, The Scientific Monthly (scan on the Internet Archive), pp. 492, 496–498

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Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research

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