The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, and Charity.

• Author: Shefer-Mossensohn, Miri
• Position: Book review

The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, and Charity. By AHMED RAGAB. New York: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015. Pp. xviii + 263. $99.99, [pounds sterling]64.99 (cloth), $80 (ebook)

The appearance of Ahmed Ragab's The Medieval Islamic Hospital sparked historical, historiographical, and methodological debates. The title of the book suggests a broad scope: the history of an important institution, namely, the hospital (bimdristan), during the medieval period (no exact definition provided) throughout the Islamic world (no exact definition here either), from three different angles: medical, religious, and charitable. With the understanding that titles also reflect marketing considerations, it should be noted, however, that Ragab has indeed set for himself several broad and ambitious tasks: (1) to explain the pre-Islamic origins of hospitals; (2) to differentiate between models that framed the foundation of Islamic hospitals under the Umayyads and early Abbasids; (3) to describe the royal patronage of hospitals in Egypt and the Levant and how the patron's involvement affected the hospital's location and architectural structure in the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods; (4) to situate the hospitals in the urban charitable context of the Mamluk period; (5) to evaluate the medical careers of Mamluk physicians in and out of hospitals; and (6) to explain the medical regimen or clinical realities prevailing in Mamluk hospitals.

Ragab examines the intellectual and social networks of physicians associated with the big hospitals in the Levant (al-Nuri in Damascus) and Cairo (al-Mansuri) based on a number of literary genres: chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and medical treatises. He explains how the Nuri circles shaped the medical theories and clinical reality that later prevailed in al-Mansuri, and notes the unique features of these medical circles, such as their inclination to be guided by specific medical authorities, mainly Ibn Sina and al-Razi, and their preference for practical medicine. Having identified these unique characteristics of medical thinking and practice, Ragab is able to illustrate the spatial movement of people (in our case, physicians), and the flow of texts and knowledge.

Based on his analysis, Ragab argues for "the reign of the bimaristan physicians" as the medical elite of the time (chap. 4). This claim raises several questions that require an explanation. First, having an "elite" suggests the existence of a well-defined...