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To: PSYCHO-FREEP

"During the Middle Ages, the Muslim world was the very first to create hospitals for treating the sick."

That's just hogwash. The ancient Greeks had hospitals. You can see the ruins of one of the greatest at Epidauros. Throughout the Christian Byzantine era the Church ran hospitals all over the empire.


72 posted on 01/01/2007 7:32:06 AM PST by Kolokotronis (Christ is Risen, and you, o death, are annihilated!)
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To: Kolokotronis
That's just hogwash.

Hmmmmm..better tell the US government then. This is off the National Institute of Health's website

Hospitals

The hospital was one of the great achievements of medieval Islamic society. The relation of the design and development of Islamic hospitals to the earlier and contemporaneous poor and sick relief facilities offered by some Christian monasteries has not been fully delineated. Clearly, however, the medieval Islamic hospital was a more elaborate institution with a wider range of functions.

In Islam there was generally a moral imperative to treat all the ill regardless of their financial status. The hospitals were largely secular institutions, many of them open to all, male and female, civilian and military, adult and child, rich and poor, Muslims and non-Muslims. They tended to be large, urban structures.

The Islamic hospital served several purposes: a center of medical treatment, a convalescent home for those recovering from illness or accidents, an insane asylum, and a retirement home giving basic maintenance needs for the aged and infirm who lacked a family to care for them. It is unlikely that any truly wealthy person would have gone to a hospital for any purpose, unless they were taken ill while traveling far from home. Except under unusual circumstances, all the medical needs of the wealthy and powerful would have been administered in the home or through outpatient clinics dispensing drugs. Though Jewish and Christian doctors working in hospitals were not uncommon, we do not know what proportion of the patients would have been non-Muslim.

An Islamic hospital was called a bimaristan, often contracted to maristan, from the Persian word bimar, `ill person', and stan, `place.' Some accounts associate the name of the early Umayyad caliph al-Walid I, who ruled from 705 to 715 (86-96 H), with the founding of a hospice, possibly a leprosarium, in Damascus. Other versions, however, suggest that he only arranged for guides to be supplied to the blind, servants to the crippled, and monetary assistance to lepers.

Islamic Culture and the Medical Arts
Islamic Culture and the Medical Arts exhibition
73 posted on 01/01/2007 7:40:14 AM PST by billbears (Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. --Santayana)
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