Care for the sick: two hospitals

This lesson asks you to write in the target language about a community and what it has given the world. The museum offers one example, how two hospitals cared for their patients. The comparison with health care in Canada, and the writing itself, your class does. ¹

List what each record says about who was cared for, who paid for it and what was supplied. Decide what you would keep in a paragraph and what needs another source.

Al-Maqrizi's page on Ibn Tulun's hospital begins by quoting Abu Umar al-Kindi's Book of Governors: Ibn Tulun ordered a hospital for the sick, built in 259 AH. He then quotes the biographical compiler's date of 261 AH and the endowment of properties after completion ². Al-Maqrizi also mentions 262 AH in an account of endowments for the hospital, a water installation and a mosque on the hill, and gives expenditure on the hospital and its income-producing property as sixty thousand dinars ². TDV gives 872 CE ³. For Baghdad's Adudi hospital the record, following Ibn al-Jawzi, gives one opening date: the beginning of Rabi II 372 AH ⁴.

The sources differ on priority. The compiler of the Tulunid biography, as quoted by al-Maqrizi, says Egypt had no earlier maristan ². TDV names in Fustat itself a foundation by Fath ibn Khaqan in 861, before the date it gives for Ibn Tulun ³. Neither account is deleted to manufacture a "first": the priority claim remains attributed.

The witness directly read is the pair of pages of al-Maqrizi's al-Khitat in the Madbuli edition, scan pages 2336–2337, and both images were checked for dates, endowments, admission conditions and expenditure ⁵. Al-Maqrizi says the hospital had disappeared without a surviving trace ⁶. The record on the Adudi hospital says an additional source is still needed for its exact site in Baghdad and for the names of the physicians who served it.

The record keeps three dates for Ibn Tulun's hospital and does not turn the difference into a construction date and an opening date, because the text does not say so. Give your reason: if you compared the two hospitals in a paragraph, which date would you write, and how would you say that the sources differ?

• The Adudi Bimaristan: what Ibn al-Jawzi says of its opening and equipment.
• Ibn Tulun's endowed civilian hospital: al-Maqrizi's two pages, the differing dates and the priority claim.
• Waqf: the endowment form on which the record says the hospital rested.

Read the records on the Adudi Bimaristan and on Ibn Tulun's hospital. Write a paragraph that compares what each supplied to its patients, using only what the records say.