Why There are Snakes in Medical Symbols; And That Time Snapple Flooded a New York City Street with Fruit Juice Trying to Set a Guinness Record
They’re the focal point of two that are very familiar to the average 21st century American: the Rod of Asclepius, and the Caduceus. Generally, they look pretty similar, at least at first glance, but, despite the fact that both intrinsically represent modern medicine, they nevertheless have very, very different origins and meanings.
First, the Rod of Asclepius:
It’s a representation of the life-giving staff carried around by Asclepius, the Ancient Greek god of medicine and healing. Like so many lesser Olympians, he ultimately ran afoul of the god king Zeus, who struck him down with his infamous thunderbolt out of fear that he’d make man immortal, posing a threat to his power and all that.
Unable to take revenge on him directly for killing his son, Asclepius’ father, the sun god Apollo, did the next-most satisfying thing, and killed the cyclopses who originally forged the murder weapon. Zeus would of course have the last word, though, and in retaliation, condemned him to a year of servitude to the mortal king Admetus.
Here’s a link to today’s Daily game:
Anyway, because he was the god of medicine, Asclepius - along with Apollo - was honored in the original version of the Hippocratic Oath, thought to have been written by the ‘father of medicine’ himself c. the 5th century BC:
‘I I swear by Apollo the physician, and Aesculapius the surgeon, likewise Hygeia and Panacea, and call all the gods and goddesses to witness, that I will observe and keep this underwritten oath, to the utmost of my power and judgment.’
A representation of his staff was subsequently adopted by Hippocrates, his contemporary followers, and his later adherents as the symbol for the new science.
As for why there’s a coiled snake wrapped around it: the Greeks believed that their venom had healing properties. Of course, it doesn’t really, but its continued use as the official insignia of hundreds of medical organizations around the globe, most notably the World Health Organization, is in honor of both the ancient tradition, and of course the namesake of the oath of ethics the guides the modern medical profession.
It’s most famously depicted on the familiar ‘Star of Life:’
It was made the universal symbol for the emergency medical services by the American Medical Association in 1963, which is why you’ll see it painted onto the side of our ambulances, and stitched onto the uniforms of the paramedics.
That Time Snapple Flooded a New York City Street with Fruit Juice Trying to Set a Guinness Record
It happened on June 21, 2005, when a construction crew attempted to erect a 25-ft tall, 35,000-pound kiwi-strawberry Snapsicle in Manhattan’s Union Square to set the Guinness World Record for the tallest ice pop ever made.
The stunt was originally proposed by the company’s marketing team early in 2005 as a way to promote a new line of freezer pops set to be debuted later that summer. Soon after, they hired a group of independent ice sculptors to put the thing together in a factory in Edison, New Jersey, with instructions to make it at least 21 feet tall — the existing record, set in the Netherlands back in 1997.
On the morning it was scheduled to be presented to the Guinness observer, it was taken from the Edison factory floor, laid flat inside the climate controlled trailer of a massive freezer truck, and shipped across the border to Manhattan. The temperature inside the trailer was set at -15 degrees Fahrenheit, just slightly warmer than the popsicle’s core temperature of -20. So, for the most part, it was pretty much in factory condition when it arrived in Union Square a little while later.
From there, a massive construction crane removed it from the back of the truck, and began the process of propping it up on its comically massive sick as a crowd of curious spectators gathered round. Within just minutes, though, the gallons and gallons and gallons of frozen strawberry-kiwi juice surrounding the plastic mold that gave it its popsicle-style shape began to melt, rapidly, in the muggy 80+ degree heat.
Nevertheless, the Snapple reps told the crew to push on, hoping that they’d be able to get it upright long enough to set the record. Alas, they were not.
Before they’d even gotten it a quarter of the way up, the panicked crowd - the Guinness Book observer among them - was scattering in fear as a wave of gooey strawberry-kiwi slush flooded the street and sidewalk below. There was barely any of it left frozen to the mold when the attempt was finally aborted.
As the NY fire and police departments rushed to cut off the flow before it reached the adjacent streets, the crew operating the crane frantically loaded what remained of the failed experiment back into the freezer trailer to try and limit the damage, but it was already pretty significant.
It took days to get it all cleaned up.
‘The fluid just kept coming,’ the Guinness Book observer Stuart Claxton told The New York Daily News after the slush had settled.
‘It was quite a lot of fluid. On a hot day like this, you have to move fast.’
What exactly caused the ice pop to come undone so soon after being removed from the truck has never been reported publicly, but Laura Radcliffe, the Snapple executive who organized the stunt, told The New York Times in the immediate aftermath that ‘it got mushy’ in transit, and so must’ve lost its structural integrity before they tried put it up.
When she was asked later in the short interview whether they’d try to rebuild it and give it another go in August, she said:
‘Probably not.’
Indeed. They didn’t.
The very similar Caduceus, meanwhile, also has its origins in Greek myth, but isn’t at all related to the Rod of Asclepius, and doesn’t actually have anything at all to do medicine.
It was the staff carried by the wing-booted, wing-helmeted Greek messenger god Hermes, or Mercury, in Roman mythology.
While there are spotty records of it symbolizing healing and treatment in both Ancient Egypt and medieval Europe, it didn’t take on that meaning in the modern world until after the outbreak of the American Civil War, when it was featured on the arm bands of field medics to denote their status as non-combatants.
Why exactly they chose to use it that way is lost to history, but the most widely circulated theory for why some still do is that, in 1902, it was made the insignia of the US Army Medical Corps (USAMC),* but only because the officers who proposed the rebrand confused it with the very similar Rod of Asclepius. At least that’s what, among other authoritative sources, the National Institute of Health claims:
‘The role of the United States Army Medical Corps (USAMC) is crucial. In 1902, at the suggestion of an assistant surgeon, Captain Frederick Reynolds, a new uniform code was established, and the caduceus became a collar insignia for all personnel in the USAMC.
His statement to the Surgeon General that the Medical Corps of “several foreign powers, notably the English” all displayed the caduceus was also erroneous. In fact, no other western medical military ser vice [sic] of that time displayed the caduceus; they all used the Aesculapius symbol. Medical Associations in Asia, India, Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany, Africa, and Scandinavia all share the Staff of Aesculapius.
Thus, the adoption of the caduceus by the USAMC seems to have been simply a misunderstanding of classical mythologic iconography.’
Some historians dispute that, of course, but, in any case, they were the first major medical organization to use it as their official insignia, and many others have since followed suit, most notably the Navy Medical Corps, the American Cancer Society, and the national Public Health Services of the US, India, Ghana, Malaysia, and Turkey.
So, there you go. That’s why all the snakes.
*The parent organization of the USAMC, the Surgeon General-led US Army Medical Department, uses the Rod of Asclepius on their official insignia.
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