Hospitals in the Islamic Civilization
During the Islamic civilization, hospitals had much developed and attained specific characteristics:
1. Secular: Hospitals served all peoples irrespective of color, religion, or background. They were run by the government rather than by the church, and their Directors were commonly physicians assisted by persons who had no religious color. In hospitals, physicians of all faiths worked together with one aim in common: the well-being of patients.
2. Separate wards: Patients of different sexes occupied separate wards. Also different diseases especially infectious ones, were allocated different wards.
3. Separate nurses: Male nurses were to take care of male patients, and vice versa.
4. Baths and water supplies: Praying five times a day is an important pillar of Islam. Sick or healthy, it is an Islamic obligation; of course physical performance depends on one's health, even he can pray while laying in bed. Before praying, washing of face, head, hands, and feet must be done, if possible. For certain conditions, a bath is obligatory. Therefore, these hospitals had to provide the patients and employees with plentiful water supply and with bathing facilities.
5. Practicing physicians: Only qualified physicians were allowed by law to practice medicine. In 931 A.D., the Caliph Al-Mugtadir from the Abbasid dynasty, ordered the Chief Court-Physician Sinan Ibn-Thabit to screen the 860 physicians-of Baghdad, and only those qualified were granted license to practice (Hamarneh 1962). The counterpart of Ibn- Tbabit, Abu-Osman Sai'd Ibn-Yaqub was ordered to do the same in Damascus, Mecca, and Medina. The latter two cities were in need for such an act because of hundreds of thousands of pilgrims visiting them every year. This was to prevent taking advantage of these pilgrims and to curb the spread of diseases among them.
6. Medical schools: The hospital was not only a place for treating patients, but also for educating medical students, interchanging medical knowledge, and developing medicine as a whole. To the main hospitals, there were attached expensive libraries containing the most up-to-date books, auditoria for meetings and lectures, and housing for students and house-staff.
7. Proper records of patients: For the first time in history, these hospitals kept records of patients and their medical care.
8. Pharmacy: During the Islamic era, the science and the profession of pharmacy had developed to an outstanding degree. The Arabic materia medica became so rich and new drugs and compounds were introduced because the Muslims had contact with almost all the known world at that time, either through control or trade. Their ships sailed to China and the Philippines, and their convoys made trades with black Africa, Europe and Asia. Chemistry became an advanced science, and there were means and need for a specialization called pharmacy.
Thus, the main Arabian hospitals were models for medieval hospitals built later in Europe. They were rather medical schools to which those seeking advanced medical knowledge, from the East or West, attended.
Source:
“Contributions Of Islam To Medicine" - Ezzat Abouleish
