Gula is the Mesopotamian goddess of healing and medicine, titled the great physician (azugallatu), who cures disease and restores the sick, and who, in the double logic characteristic of Mesopotamian deities, can inflict the very illnesses she heals, so that treaty-curses call on her to visit sickness on oath-breakers. Her sacred animal is the dog, and excavations at her cult centres, especially Isin, have turned up numerous dog figurines and even dog burials, apparently votive offerings connected with her healing power. She is the patroness of the asu, the practising physicians who worked alongside the incantation-priests, and she is invoked over the sick and in the swearing of covenants. Her double edge, holding both the wound and its cure, makes her the Mesopotamian counterpart, in this atlas, of the wounded healer Chiron. Gula's identity is itself the product of syncretism: she absorbed, or was absorbed by, several originally distinct goddesses, Ninisina, the tutelary goddess of Isin, Ninkarrak and Bau (also read Baba), whose own sacred animal was the dog before the two figures merged.
Specialists date the main blending chiefly to the Old Babylonian period, roughly 2000 to 1600 BCE, and in the case of Bau and Ninisina it is read as bound up with the political rivalry between Lagash and Isin, when sharing a healing-goddess identity served to link or rank rival cult centres. Once merged with Ninisina, Gula could be styled Lady of Isin, so that "Gula" in a first-millennium text may carry the inherited identity of several older, once separate, city goddesses at once.