Smart really. In a time before dissection became common, the guy charged with torturing and/or killing people probably had the best anatomical knowledge of anyone.
There were also the corpse-magic superstitions, but I wonder how much of that itself arose from the coincidental 'getting covered in corpse juice" that occurred alongside having your broken bones set by that guy, and misattributing the cause of the subsequent healing.








I believe both the Christians and the Muslims had this sort of system actually, hence they would raid each other’s populations for slaves, to avoid upsetting their gods by enslaving the wrong people.