Caduceus

The Caduceus embodied the Mercurian attributes. The wings represented transport, the serpents represented duplicity and guile, and the pressurized hollow shaft of poisonous vapor represented unexpected instant death.

CADUCEUS, em­blem of the health care in­dus­try; orig­i­nal­ly a cthon­ic de­vice wield­ed by Mer­cury (né Her­mes), the god of busi­ness and en­ter­prise, who was re­spon­si­ble for the traf­fick­ing of souls be­tween the earth­ly plane and the un­der­world, and the rit­u­al un­bur­den­ing of them from their pe­cu­niary en­cum­brances.

After the col­lapse of the clas­si­cal or­der and sub­se­quent dis­so­lu­tion of the Olympia­ic theur­gy in A.D. 426, pos­ses­sion of the item du­ly passed to the church in Rome, where it re­mained un­til its ac­ci­den­tal demise at the hands of in­vad­ing Napoleon­ic troops in 1798. A sur­viv­ing frag­ment, con­sist­ing of the cen­tral rod with a sin­gle ser­pent (of­ten in­cor­rect­ly called the Rod of As­cle­pius), even­tu­al­ly made its way to the Unit­ed States, where it would trans­form the fledgling ther­a­peu­tic arts.

The non-con­duc­tance of souls and their tem­po­ral as­sets is now gen­er­al­ly un­der­stood to be a grave en­vi­ron­men­tal haz­ard, es­pe­cial­ly in cities where over­crowd­ing and in­suf­fi­cient drainage risks harm­ful ac­cu­mu­la­tion of psy­choe­co­nom­ic residues. As a re­sult, the twen­ti­eth and twen­ty-first cen­turies have seen a pro­gres­sive phas­ing out of hos­pi­tals in fa­vor of fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions which pro­vide a wide range of ser­vices in ad­di­tion to the oc­ca­sion­al cur­ing of dis­ease.