Caduceus as a symbol of medicine a review of 257 of the works bearing this printer's device only one was related to medicine. Similar use of the caduceus in printers' marks continues to the present day, with companies including F. A. Davis Company still using the symbol as an element of their insignia. There are a few other examples of use in this period. It may have been used as a symbol by Sir William Butts, physician to Henry VIII. Similarly, physician John Caius, founder of Caius College, Cambridge, and at the time President of the Royal College of Physicians, during official visits to his eponymous
Caduceus see Dracunculiasis. The term "kerukeion" denoted any herald's staff, not necessarily associated with Hermes in particular. In his study of the cult of Hermes, Lewis Richard Farnell (1909) assumed that the two snakes had simply developed out of ornaments of the shepherd's crook used by heralds as their staff. This view has been rejected by later authors pointing to parallel iconography in the Ancient Near East. It has been argued that the staff or wand entwined by two snakes was itself representing a god in the pre-anthropomorphic era. Like the herm or priapus, it would thus be a predecessor of