A Cure for Serpents the same year by Kathleen Naylor. It was republished by Eland in 2005, with an Afterward by Dervla Murphy. A Cure for Serpents A Cure for Serpents: A Doctor in Africa is a 1955 travel book by Alberto Denti di Pirajno, later the Duke of Pirajno, an Italian doctor, writer and former colonial governor of Tripoli. Set in Libya, Ethiopia and Somaliland, the book is a collection of anecdotes about various places he visited in his work as a physician in North Africa in the 1920s and the people he met, which includes tribal chieftains, Berber princes, courtesans and Tuareg
Caduceus is a continuation of the older Indo-European dragon-slayer motif. Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (1913) pointed out that the serpent as an attribute of both Hermes and Asclepius is a variant of the "pre-historic semi-chthonic serpent hero known at Delphi as Python", who in classical mythology is slain by Apollo. One Greek myth of origin of the caduceus is part of the story of Tiresias, who found two snakes copulating and killed the female with his staff. Tiresias was immediately turned into a woman, and so remained until he was able to repeat the act with the male snake seven years later.