Before then, medicine had been – for the most part – barely distinguishable from magic. People believed that you fell ill if you’d displeased some god or other, and that disease was the result of an evil spirit possessing your body. As a result, the work of a physician would involve a lot of chanting and singing and superstition, which sounds like a lot of fun, but probably not for the person who was relying on it all to stop them from dying.
