Panagiotidou/Healing, Disease and Placebo, 4. Taking the Journey

Chapter 4 examines how influences and motivations common in people’s social and cultural surroundings would have mediated patients’ decisions to visit an asclepieion, and further how the particular contexts of the asclepieia could have influenced supplicants’ personal perceptions, conceptions, feelings, and expectations for healing, facilitating and potentially activating placebo effects.