ABSTRACT
In 1156 Saladin's predecessor, Sultan Nur al-Din, completed the greatest hospital in Damascus, al-Nuri, which he equipped with a library where medicine was taught and discussed. One of the benefits of the crusades was that the Franks in Syria and in Egypt met with modern medical care and well-equipped hospitals, which could serve as models for their own hospitals and those of Europe in the thirteenth century. The European hospitals in the Middle Ages aimed at caring for patients rather than healing them, or at isolating them, for instance in leprosoria. In the Arab hospitals the patients were treated by use of the scholarly medical methods of the time: medicinal, surgical or psychiatrical, as the case might be, and students were trained to be physicians. Hospitals usually had wards for male and female medicinal, surgical, oph thalmological, psychiatric, orthopaedic, dysentery and fever cases and a ward for convalescents.
