A Cure for Serpents 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 tribesmen and of a lioness, which became part pet and part guard. The book was translated into English in
Caduceus as a symbol of medicine publishing and the role of Mercury as a messenger and scribe. He notes, however In any case, in Great Britain, as late as 1854, the distinction between the rod of Asclepius and the caduceus as symbols of two very different professions was apparently still quite clear. In his article "On Tradesmen's Signs of London" A.H. Burkitt notes that among the very old symbols still used in London at that time, which were based on associations between pagan gods and professions, "we find Mercury, or his "caduceus", appropriate in trade, as indicating expedition. "Esculapius", his "Serpent and staff", or his "cock",