From History Extra:
If your donkey fell ill in ancient Mesopotamia, the solution wasn’t to summon a vet: it was to call an exorcist. It was a lucrative career path that began with sick animals, but could culminate at a king’s bedside.
“People who started out as veterinary exorcists then moved on to treating humans,” says historian Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid – author of Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History – who was speaking on this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast about Mesopotamian culture and society.