Some speak also of an eclectic school, whose chief representative is Galen himself. Only the Methodists, however, could claim to be a genuinely self-defined sect, with a founder and distinct medical theory. In evaluating dreams, however, these two schools at least stood apart from the Methodists. Empiricist physicians, who rejected theory of all kind and based their practice on experience, accepted the possibility that dreams, like any other experience, might point to useful therapeutic practices. No indication seems to have survived of the dogmatists' attitude toward medical dreams, but there is no reason to believe that they denied their utility.
Divine dreams are another matter.
Those that came from Asclepius or other healing gods play an especially prominent role in Greco-Roman medicine. These dreams, which the sick eagerly solicited at shrines like those at Pergamum or Ephesus, had by their very nature a claim to be regarded as both god-sent and true, and thus distinct from the natural dreams that were the province of physicians. For the ordinary patient, messages from a healing god were one among many available sources of medical knowledge. The tablets describe miraculous cures performed by Asclepius. These are exceptions, however, and the vast majority of cures recorded on the stelae come after the ailing suppliants have slept in the sanctuary in hopes of a cure.