A bimaristan, also known as dar al-shifa or simply maristan, is a hospital in the historic Islamic world. Bimaristans served the purpose of being a designated place where medical treatment would be given to individuals in need. They were also used to advance medical students’ knowledge in the medical field. The most famous Islamic hospitals are located in Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus.
About Bimaristan in brief
A bimaristan, also known as dar al-shifa or simply maristan, is a hospital in the historic Islamic world. Bimaristans served the purpose of being a designated place where medical treatment would be given to individuals in need. Islamic hospitals were also used to advance medical students’ knowledge in the medical field, especially the most well-known bimaristan located in Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo. The term is often used to designate the historical or pre-modern institutions that existed in the Islamic world, but they are also still used sometimes in their native languages to refer to modern hospitals or to specific types of medical institutions. The first bimaristani, built in 706 in Damascus by the Umayyad Caliph named Al-Walid, focused on treating individuals with leprosy. The third and fourth Islamic hospital were built in Baghdad by Caliph Harun al-Rashid. This Islamic hospital in Baghdad was the first documented general hospital. It was also the first hospital to be located in a tent to treat war victims from the Battle of the Ditch. Mobile Hospitals consisted of medications, food and water, doctors, and pharmacists to aid the patients. These services from the mobile hospital transitioned into the other Islamic hospitals that were built as well. The Islamic hospitals can best be understood by being viewed as a philanthropy because they gave public assistance to individuals who needed care. They were able to provide these services at no costs due to waqfs, which were endowments that paid for the costs of creating bimitarianans as well as maintaining them.
The most famous Islamic hospitals are located in Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus, but there are many others that can be found in other cities and in the Middle East as well, such as Basra, Basrah, Mosul, and Najib, and even in the United Arab Emirates. The hospitals were generally located in urban areas. Most Islamic hospitals did not discriminate on who could be a patient; even wealthy individuals used them when they became ill when traveling instead of an outpatient facility or home care. The patients were divided into these different sections based on their needs. Patients were also divided up to minimize the risk of spreading illnesses to other patients. Not only were Islamic hospitals used to provide care for individuals, they were alsoused to advance knowledge of Islamic Medicine by medical students. Muhammad ibn Zakariya al- Razi, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, Ibn Sina, Ali ibn Isa al-Kahhal, Ibn al-Nafis, and Mir Mu’min Husayni Tunikabuni were all students that trained at Islamic hospitals in order to advance their knowledge. The Canon of Medicine was constructed by Avicenna and classified more than one hundred diseases, who classified the humic control of the eyes as an optometrist. Hunayn was also a mediator between the Greek sciences and the government as well as a physician.
You want to know more about Bimaristan?
This page is based on the article Bimaristan published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 09, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
