Ahmed Ragab - The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, and Charity

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Ahmed Ragab 2015

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First published 2015

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN 978-1-107-10960-5 Hardback

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To Soha and Carmen

I am fortunate that I have many people to acknowledge for their help with this project and that the debts accrued in the making of this book have led to valuable intellectual encounters and the reinforcement of treasured relationships that continue to enrich my life and scholarship after this project has been completed. My friend, mentor, and adviser, Anne-Marie Moulin, watched this project develop from its earliest phases and was present not only as it took shape, but also as I became a historian. Her mentorship, companionship, and friendship will always lie behind my work as a historian of science. I was also so fortunate as to work with Danielle Jacquart, whose work helped shape the history of medieval sciences as we know it; it has been an honor and a privilege to participate in so distinguished a scholarly tradition. Danielle Jacquarts comments, interventions, and advice were integral to my work. I am also grateful to my friend, colleague, co-instructor, and co-author (of another book!), Katharine Park. She remains a mentor and interlocutor to whom I owe much. Katy spent many hours with the draft of this book; thanks to her suggestions, a more coherent story and decisive voice emerged.

I cannot describe my gratitude to Anne Harrington a central force in my development as a scholar whose encouragement and mentorship continue to inspire and guide my work. I am deeply indebted, too, to Janet Brownes continued care, advice, and support, and for her investment in my growth as a scholar. Bill Grahams and Janet Gyatsos counsel and guidance bore tremendous impact on my scholarship, as well as on the development of this project over the past years. I am also much obliged to David Hempton for all he has done to facilitate my work and scholarship.

Faye Bodley-Dangelo edited the book and helped guide it to its current state. Joseph Vignone and Hadel Jarada helped me revise the transliterations. Anna Attaway, Lewis West, and Will Morningstar patiently and carefully copyedited and proofread the final version of the book, with Anna and Lewis making sure that the narrative was lucid and unencumbered by errors or oversights. Alex Chen helped me with the preparation of the maps and illustrations. I am beholden to them all.

The comments of my anonymous reviewers were integral to the development of this project and the execution of the book; their insights and views were very beneficial and are much appreciated. I have also been grateful, throughout this process, for the sure hands of Laura Morris my editor at Cambridge University Press and for her care of the manuscript and project as a whole, which were a major force in bringing it to completion.

It is hard to imagine being here without the care, support, encouragement, and doubts of my parents. Their love and dedication to the education and well-being of my siblings and myself are at the heart of all that I do.

Throughout the years of working on this project and of writing this book, there has been one person, especially, who stood by me through it all: my love, partner, wife, and friend, Soha Bayoumi. Her insights and opinions helped move this research on to more interesting, more innovative grounds. Her patience with the emotional and psychological toll that this work exacts allowed the book to come to life. As the book was slowly coming together, our little one, Carmen, arrived in our family. It is not possible to describe the joy that she brought, and continues to bring, to our lives. No words can describe my gratitude for all that Soha did at that time to allow this book to come to life and how she did so with such grace, love, care, and personal investment. This book is as much hers as it is mine.

For a long time, the study of the history of Islamic hospitals has focused on what Michael Dols called their apparent modernity. Earlier historians of Islamic medicine were attracted to what seemed to be a premodern ancestor of modern hospitals: Islamic hospitals were seen as relatively secular (to use Dolss terms again) because they were run by physicians or state officials and not by religious scholars and also because they had non-Muslim physicians working in them. This medical nature of the Islamic hospital was embodied in a number of qualities, namely, that it was designed and managed by educated Galenic physicians; furthermore, the hospital focused on the sick with the intention of curing rather than isolating them (and, because of this, hospitals were built in the centers of cities and not on their outskirts) and sponsored medical education and training.

As such, the Islamic hospital stood in contrast to earlier and contemporary charitable institutions, where physicians had little role or control and care was generally focused either on the needy such as paupers, the hungry, crippled, blind, and the like or on a specific group of diseased people that the institution cared for but isolated, like lepers. The Islamic institution was thus medicalized in that it was not a hospice, an orphanage, or a leprosarium. This focus on medicalization as a distinctive characteristic of hospitals in general, and of Islamic hospitals in particular, legitimized and prompted investigations into the origins of these hospitals. When did the first (true) Islamic hospital appear? What are the premedicalized, prehospital origins of these practices? And how did they become medicalized over time? Finally, how and when did the hospital deteriorate, or lose its medical nature by allowing religious scholars to dominate the field and the institution?