"THE ANCIENT GREEKS SACRIFICED UGLY PEOPLE"

"In early Greek history, during times of plague or famine, when the precarious agrarian societies started to fear for their survival, each Greek town would elect its ugliest inhabitant, known as the pharmakos. ("Ugly" in this case probably meant deformed in some way, and certainly from the fringes of society. An aristocrat with a big nose would not qualify.) For a while, this person would be fed at public expense with the most exquisite delicacies available at the time—figs, barley cakes and cheese. Afterwards, he or she (or they – some places, like Athens, would choose two lucky uggos, a man and a woman) would be driven through the town while being violently smote with leeks and wild plants by a wrathful mob. This ugly unfortunate's fate largely depended on the town’s own tradition. In some places he or she was merely cast out of the city, while in others the pharmakos would be stoned to death, burned, or thrown off a cliff.

How popular was this ritual? In some places, so popular that it became annual...

The related word pharmakon, which later originated the English word "pharmacy," meant both poison and medicine. This reflects the ambiguous role of the unfortunate pharmakos: he held the guilt for all the evils that had affected society, but he was also its savior."

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-ancient-greeks-sacrificed-ugly-people

I'm wondering about definitions of ugly, and its relationship to health/medicine. I'm writing this from a coffeeshop in downtown Chicago and it's so strange to sit here in 2015 and think about how much of our society is still influenced by the ancient Greeks. I'm about to walk over to a class on the medical school campus, where students will still take the Hippocratic Oath when they graduate.