Today it is the Museum of Medicine and Science in the Arab World. The Nur al-Din Bimaristan, a hospital and medical school in Damascus, was founded in the 12th century. The institutional bimaristans were devoted to the promotion of health, the curing of diseases and the expansion and dissemination of medical knowledge. Hospitals set examinations for the students and issued diplomas.
ASCENSION HOSPITALS HOW TO
Attached to the larger hospitals-then as now-were medical schools and libraries where senior physicians taught students how to apply their growing knowledge directly with patients. The bimaristan was but one important result of the great deal of energy and thought medieval Islamic civilizations put into developing the medical arts. The bimaristan served variously as a center of treatment, a convalescent home for those recovering from illness or accident, a psychological asylum and a retirement home that gave basic maintenance to the aged and infirm who lacked a family to care for them. Their bimaristan, or asylum of the sick, was not only the true forerunner of the modern hospital, but also virtually indistinguishable from the modern multi-service healthcare and medical education center. A long line of caliphs, sultans, scholars and medical practitioners took ancient knowledge and time-honored practices from diverse traditions and melded them with their original research to feed centuries of intellectual achievement and drive a continual quest for improvement.
We can do that because of the systematic approach-both scientifically and socially-to health care that developed in medieval Islamic societies.
Almost anywhere in the world now, we expect a hospital to be a place where we can receive ease from pain and help for healing in times of illness or accidents. The hospital is an invention that was both medical and social, and today it is an institution we take for granted, hoping rarely to need it but grateful for it when we do. The modern West’s approach to health and medicine owes countless debts to the ancient past: Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome and India, to name a few.
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