The story of Asclepius begins with a betrayal. Coronis, the daughter of Phlegyas, king of the Lapiths in Thessaly, a tribe of northern Greece, had become the lover of Apollo, the Olympian god of light, music, and prophecy, and had conceived his child. But while she carried the god's son, she took another lover, a mortal man named Ischys, son of Elatus. Apollo learned of her infidelity in one of two ways: either a white raven, which he had set to watch over her, brought him the news, or his own prophetic powers revealed the truth. In his rage, Apollo cursed the raven and turned its feathers from white to black, which is why all ravens are black to this day. Then he sent his sister Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, to punish Coronis. Artemis struck her down with her golden arrows in her chamber at Lacereia in Thessaly, or in some accounts Apollo killed her himself. As Coronis lay upon her funeral pyre and the flames began to rise, Apollo could not bear to let his unborn child perish with her. He strode into the fire, the flames parting before him, and snatched the infant from her womb. In some accounts it was Hermes, the messenger god, who performed this rescue. From this act of cutting open, the child received his name: Asclepius, which means "to cut open."

The infant was taken to Mount Pelion in Thessaly and entrusted to Chiron, the immortal centaur who alone among his kind was wise and just, who had taught Achilles, the greatest warrior of the Trojan War, and Jason, the leader of the Argonauts who sailed for the Golden Fleece. Chiron raised Asclepius in his cave and instructed him in the arts of medicine and hunting. The poet Pindar, writing in the fifth century BCE, describes how Chiron taught the boy to be a healer for all mankind: to cure plagues with festering sores, to heal wounds from bronze weapons and sling-stones, to treat limbs ravaged by summer heat or winter cold. Asclepius learned to use gentle songs of incantation, soothing draughts of medicine, doctored salves, and the surgeon's knife. His skill grew so great that he surpassed his teacher, and the goddess Athena gave him a gift of extraordinary power: the blood of the Gorgon Medusa, a creature so terrible that one look at her face turned living things to stone. The blood from the left side of her body was deadly poison, but the blood from the right side could preserve life and even restore the dead to the world of the living.

With this power Asclepius became the greatest healer who ever lived. He cured the sick, mended the wounded, and brought back those who had already crossed the threshold of death. The tragedian Aeschylus wrote that he possessed the skill to raise from the dead, and the mythographer Apollodorus records that he revived the dead using the Gorgon's blood. In one tradition, he raised Hippolytus, the son of Theseus, who had been dragged to his death by his own horses after a false accusation from his stepmother Phaedra. In another, he was simply tempted by a large fee to cure a man already at the point of death. Whatever the specific case, his power to reverse death itself threatened the natural order. Hades, the god of the underworld, complained to Zeus that the realm of the dead was being emptied, and Zeus himself feared that if mortals learned to cure death, they would approach the realm of the immortals. To preserve the boundary between life and death, Zeus hurled his thunderbolt at Asclepius, killing both the healer and the man he had raised.

Apollo was devastated by the death of his son. Unable to strike at Zeus directly, he took his revenge on the Cyclopes, the one-eyed giants who had forged the thunderbolt for the king of the gods. He slew them with his arrows, and for this Zeus banished Apollo from Olympus for one year, forcing him to serve as a herdsman for the mortal king Admetus in Thessaly. But the story did not end with death. Zeus, seeking to reconcile with his son Apollo, raised Asclepius to the heavens and placed him among the stars as the constellation Ophiuchus, the Serpent-Bearer, where he still shines holding a serpent in his hands. At the same time, Asclepius was deified and became a god in his own right, worshipped across the Greek world as the divine patron of physicians. His most famous sanctuary was at Epidaurus in the Peloponnese, where the sick came to sleep in his temple and be healed in their dreams by the god himself, guided by the non-venomous serpents that dwelled in his shrines.

Asclepius married Epione, the goddess of soothing pain, and their children carried on his work. Machaon and Podalirius were the two great physicians of the Greek army at Troy, tending to wounds that no ordinary healer could touch. Hygeia became the goddess of health and cleanliness, Panacea the goddess of universal remedy, Iaso the goddess of recuperation, Aceso the goddess of the healing process, and Aglaia the goddess of beauty and splendour. The staff of Asclepius, a rough-hewn branch of cypress wood entwined with a single serpent, became the symbol of medicine that physicians still use today. The serpent represented renewal and healing through its ability to shed its skin, and the cypress was sacred to Apollo, the healer's father. From the burning pyre of Coronis to the stars of Ophiuchus, from the cave of Chiron to the temples of Epidaurus, Asclepius stands as the bridge between mortal suffering and divine cure, the healer who dared too much and was rewarded with immortality.