Caduceus as a symbol of medicine worth noting that hospital stewards were not physicians; they played a supporting role preparing drugs for surgeons, supervising nurses and cooks, maintaining accounting and medical records, and in emergencies sometimes performed minor surgery or provided prescriptions. Later, in 1871, the Surgeon General designated the caduceus as the seal of the Marine Hospital Service (destined to become the U.S. Public Health Service in 1912). Gershen states that the change was for aesthetic reasons, whereas Friedlander states the caduceus was adopted by the Marine Hospital Service "because of its relationship with merchant seamen and the maritime industry". The caduceus was formally adopted
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