Islam Had Specialist Medicine in Dark Ages

Specialist medical research, free public health treatment and retirement homes for the aged were available in Baghdad and other parts of the Islamic world in AD950, while Britons were still in the Dark Ages, Emilie Savage-Smith of the University of Oxford told the British Association science festival in Salford yesterday.

She told a special session on science and Islam that although there had been hospitals in Byzantium, an extensive system of teaching hospitals had first been introduced by Arab physicians in the early 10th century. In Islam, there was a moral imperative to treat the sick regardless of financial status.

Hospitals acted as convalescent homes, treatment centres, insane asylums and retirement homes and were open to male and female, rich and poor, Muslim and non-Muslim. The first had been built in Baghdad in AD850.

"By the time you get to the 12th or 13th century you have a remarkable system of numerous hospitals in urban areas," Dr Savage-Smith said. "Many of them, the largest ones, had wards devoted to only, say, ophthalmology, another ward to surgery ... These hospitals stand in remarkable contrast to what was going on in western hospitals, because they were hospices, religious centres that provided custodial care, food and clothing ... and little medicine."

A treatise from Islamic Spain of around AD1000 had the first illustrations of surgical instruments - including a device for tonsillectomy.