“I have written this book to take a closer look at my profession and perhaps in the hope of awakening the interest of the reader, as I deal with issues such as illness and suffering that, sooner or later, will affect us all. The book talks about the art of medicine, that is, about the ability to recognize diseases and the gift of foreseeing or predicting their development. Often, the text makes inroads into the fields of poetry and music, which is due to the author's conviction that medicine and art have a common origin in magic, since the main questions of both derive from myths — those eternal dreams — especially Greek myths, and the mysterious purification to which the title alludes is present both in the history of medicine and in aesthetics, the foundations of which were created by Pythagoras and Aristotle.