When you next drive by or have cause to visit a hospital, consider the marvellous fact that hospitals, as we know them today, with wards and teaching centers, come from 9th century Egypt. The first such medical center was the Ahmad ibn Tulun Hospital, founded in 872 in Cairo.

Tulun hospital provided free care for anyone who needed it – A policy based on the Muslim tradition of caring for all who are sick. From Cairo, such hospitals spread around the Muslim world reaching Spain, Sicily, and North Africa.

It is the earliest for which there is clear evidence that care for the mentally unstable (the word ‘insane’ is often used in older texts). was provided. By the end of the century, two hospitals were also said to have been built in Old Cairo (Fustat) and, in the 12th century, Saladin founded the Nasiri hospital in Cairo. This was surpassed in size and importance by the Mansuri, completed in 1284 (638 H) after eleven months of construction.

The Mansuri hospital remained the primary medical center in Cairo through the 15th century. The Nuri hospital in Damascus was a major one from the time of its foundation in the middle of the 12th century well into the 15th century, by which time the city contained 5 additional hospitals.

Besides those in Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo, hospitals were built throughout Islamic lands. In al-Qayrawan, the Arab capital of Tunisia, a hospital was built in the 9th century, and early ones were established at Mecca and Medina.

Iran had several, and the one at Rayy was headed by al-Razi prior to his moving to Baghdad. Ottoman hospitals flourished in Turkey in the 13th century, and there were hospitals in the Indian provinces. Hospitals were comparatively late in being established in Islamic Spain, the earliest possibly being built in 1397 (800 H) in Granada.

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.

All the hospitals in Islamic lands were financed from the revenues of pious bequests called waqfs. Wealthy men, and especially rulers, donated property as endowments, whose revenue went toward building and maintaining the institution. The property could consist of shops, mills, caravanserais, or even entire villages. The income from an endowment would pay for the maintenance and running costs of the hospital, and sometimes would supply a small stipend to the patient upon dismissal. Part of the state budget also went toward the maintenance of a hospital. The services of the hospital were to be free, though individual physicians might charge fees.

Thank you to the Arab world for paving the way for the facilities we now consider vital in modern society.