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They wouldn't have just thought it would have existed, thanks to the placebo effect it actually would have existed in a real way. If you were a medieval scientist who did a study comparing the outcomes between people who received magical healing and those who did not, the people who received magical healing would most likely show better subjective outcomes (objective too most likely, but good luck measuring blood concentration levels in 200 BC) and recovery rates. When you remember that the placebo effect exists and you can even see people getting (placebo-equivalent) results from faith healing in the modern day, I think that believing in magic is actually entirely reasonable for the ancients - after all, a double-blinded study would actually provide evidence for the efficacy of magical healing in those times, so I don't feel like judging them too hard for believing what would actually be statistically significant and easily replicable phenomenon in their context.
One of the other uses for magic, divination, was useful because it essentially functioned as a random number generator - and if you're trying to make sure that your opponents cannot predict your movements, literally throwing the dice and picking at random is often the optimal strategy. There are actually real, adaptive reasons for the ancients to believe in magic, it would have been a useful tool in their lives and the experiments they were capable of performing would indeed show that magic was real for them.
Why would magical healing prove more effective than a placebo in a double blind study, where, by definition, neither the doctor nor the patient knows whether the patient receives the “real” treatment or a placebo?
I may have been being a bit glib - my mind automatically translated "most effective research technique we have for dealing with placebos and magic in the modern day" and simply transposed it to the past. I meant more that their most effective research techniques would actually produce repeatable and consistent evidence that magical healing worked.
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