There were different incantations for different diseases; and they were as mysterious to the masses as are the mystic formulas of the modern physician to the bewildered, yet trusting, patient.

Indeed, their mysterious character added to the power supposed to reside in the incantations for driving the demons away.

Medicinal remedies accompanied the recital of the incantations, but despite the considerable progress made by such nations of hoary antiquity as the Egyptians and Babylonians in the diagnosis and treatment of common diseases, leading in time to the development of an extensive pharmacology, so long as the cure of disease rested with the priests, the recital of sacred formulas, together with rites that may be conveniently grouped under the head of sympathetic magic, was regarded as equally essential with the taking of the prescribed remedies."(14) (14) Morris Jastrow: The Liver in Antiquity and the Beginnings of Anatomy.

Transactions College of Physicians, Philadelphia, 1907, 3.s., XXIX, 117-138.
Three points of interest may be referred to in connection with Babylonian medicine.

Our first recorded observations on anatomy are in connection with the art of divination--the study of the future by the interpretation of certain signs.