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.
Woman Bitten by a Serpent Woman Bitten by a Serpent Woman Bitten by a Serpent is an 1847 marble sculpture by Auguste Clésinger (1814-1883), now in the musée d'Orsay in Paris. It was commissioned by the industrialist Alfred Mosselman and first exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1847, where it and Thomas Couture's "The Romans in their Decadence" were the most commented-upon works. Clésinger had modelled his work on a life-cast of the Mossellman's mistress, the demi-mondaine Apollonie Sabatier (1822-1890), later Charles Baudelaire's muse. The direct use of a life cast as the basis for a sculpture was highly controversial in the 19th century, particularly