Hospitals
Many hospitals were developed during the early Islamic era. They were called Bimaristan, which is a Persian word meaning "house of the sick." The idea of a hospital being a place for the care of sick people was taken from the early Caliphs. The bimaristan is seen as early as the time of the Prophet Muhammad, and the Prophet's mosque in the city of Madinah held the first Muslim hospital service in its courtyard. During the Ghazwah Khandaq (the Battle of the Trench), Muhammad came across wounded soldiers and he ordered a tent be assembled to provide medical care. Over time, Caliphs and rulers expanded traveling bimaristans to include doctors and pharmacists.
Ummayad Caliph Al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik is often credited with building the first bimaristan in Damascus in 707 AD. The bimaristan had a staff of salaried physicians and a well equipped dispensary. It treated the blind, lepers and other disabled people, and also separated those patients with leprosy from the rest of the ill. Some consider this bimaristan no more than a lepersoria because it only segregated patients with leprosy. The first true Islamic hospital was built during the reign of Caliph Harun al-Rashid. The Caliph invited the son of chief physician, Jabril ibn Bukhtishu to head the new Baghdad bimaristan. It quickly achieved fame and led to the development of other hospitals in Baghdad.
Read more about this topic: Islamic Medicine
Famous quotes containing the word hospitals:
“Our panaceas cure but few ails, our general hospitals are private and exclusive. We must set up another Hygeia than is now worshiped. Do not the quacks even direct small doses for children, larger for adults, and larger still for oxen and horses? Let us remember that we are to prescribe for the globe itself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We achieve “active” mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)
“... women can never do efficient and general service in hospitals until their dress is prescribed by laws inexorable as those of the Medes and Persians. Then, that dress should be entirely destitute of steel, starch, whale-bone, flounces, and ornaments of all descriptions; should rest on the shoulders, have a skirt from the waist to the ankle, and a waist which leaves room for breathing.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)