The Medieval Islamic Hospital

Assistant Professor of Science and Religion at Harvard Divinity School Ahmed Ragab’s The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, and Charity is the first book-length treatment of the subject in English and a solid addition to the research on the medicinal arts, institutions, patrons and practitioners in Islamic civilization from the third to the seventh Hijri centuries. Previous milestones in the field include Ahmad [Isa’s 1939 Tarikh al-bimaristanat fi’l-Islam, Manfred Ullman’s 1970 Die Medizin im Islam (Islamic Medicine, 1978), Sami K. Hamarneh’s 1962 “Development of Hospitals in Islam” and 1983 Health Sciences in Early Islam, Fazlur Rahman’s largely epistemological 1987 Health and Medicine in the Islamic Tradition, Michael Dols’ 1987 “Origins of the Islamic Hospital,” Peter Portmann and Emilie Savage-Smith’s 2007 Medieval Islamic Medicine and many others which this work builds upon and critiques to varied extents......