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"The hospital shall keep all patients, men and women, until they are completely recovered. All costs are to be borne by the hospital whether the people come from afar or near, whether they are residents or foreigners, strong or weak, low or high, rich or poor...
...employed or unemployed, blind or sighted, physically or mentally ill, learned or illiterate. There are no conditions of consideration and payment; none is objected to or even indirectly hinted at for non-payment...
The entire service is through the magnificence of God, the generous one."
- from the waqf (endowment deed) for the Hospital of Sultan al-Nasir Qalawun, Cairo, 1285. The hospital continued to operate for over 400 years, until the 19th c. https://archnet.org/sites/1551
- from the waqf (endowment deed) for the Hospital of Sultan al-Nasir Qalawun, Cairo, 1285. The hospital continued to operate for over 400 years, until the 19th c. https://archnet.org/sites/1551
More details on the history of the Hospital of Qalawun can be found in Ahmad Raghab, The Medieval Islamic Hospital: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/medieval-islamic-hospital/6038FE27C86A675A7CA62352EA51972E
And I just discovered the @NIH has a page on the history of Islamic hospitals! It should be WAY LONGER https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/islamic_medical/islamic_12.html
The image is of Dioscorodes and a Student from a 13th c. Arabic copy of De Materia Medica - I believe this folio is in the collection of the New York Public Library? Would be grateful for help with the identification and I'll fix it on Wikipedia (from whence I pulled this image)!
