Medicine · a Light

Hospitals were paid for by endowments, not by patients

The bimaristan, from a Persian word meaning place of the sick, was funded by waqf, a permanent endowment. A donor signed over shops, farms or a bathhouse, and the rent paid the staff and the drugs from then on. The deed set the rules, and several survive. The Adudi hospital in Baghdad opened around 981 and Nur al-Din's in Damascus in 1154, and both had wards divided by complaint, including for mental illness, with salaried physicians, oculists, surgeons, bone setters and pharmacists, a kitchen and a library. Treatment was free because the endowment said so, not because a state had decided to provide health care. The system depended on wealthy people wanting a charity that outlived them, and it decayed wherever the endowments were seized or lost.

Bimaristans · Baghdad c. 981, Damascus 1154