We had been there before but it was on a Friday and the place was closed. This time, as we walked up the street - the fifth on the right walking up the souq al-Hamidiya towards the Great Mosque, things looked no more promising as we could see workmen digging up the entrance. However, the door was open so we went inside.
The word bimaristan comes from the Persian and is made up of two separate words, mar which means sick person or patient and stan which means home or homeland (as in Pakistan etc.). So bimarstans were homes for (bi) sick people, that is hospitals or healing centres. The Bimaristan Nur ad-Din was founded as a hospital and medical teaching centre in 1154 when Nur ad-Din, Saladin’s uncle, added Damascus to his conquests, more by charm than by arms it is said, and for centuries it was the most renowned medical institution in the Orient. It continued to function as a hospital until the nineteenth century when the National Hospital was built in Damascus, and a picture of the last graduates from the centre in 1921-22 is displayed in the building which was turned into the Museum of Arab Medicine and Science in 1978.
To the right of the entrance is a room which I am glad we saw first, because my heart sank as I entered it to find a collection of stuffed birds and animals of every kind. The ignominy of seeing a grey fox, with mothballs in its ears and mouth, standing up on its hind legs, wearing a waistcoat and red bow tie and proferring a basket was just too much to bear. Fortunately, the rest of the museum was fascinating enough to mitigate the outrage I felt there.
The entrance gives way to the typical inner courtyard with a fountain and trees casting their shade. Opposite the entrance door is the main iwan which is where teaching used to take place, the teacher seated before his students who sat on cushions at his feet. The teaching method involved the teacher explaining the topic to the students whose questions were clarified during the ensuing discussioin. They then memorized the texts of the great medical authorities.
Arab medicine and science flourished at a time when Europe was largely ignorant of such matters. The texts of Greek and Roman antiquity had been lost in Europe but they were known and translated into Arabic by the learned men of the day who added their own contributions to this corpus of knowledge. Spain, as part of the Islamic world of the Middle Ages, was party to this tradition and it was largely through such contacts that the Renaissance was to occur.
The museum is small but the amount of information it contains is quite impressive. One of the rooms is the pharmacy and here there are several showcases with samples of the herbs, plants and minerals which formed the basis of Arab medicine accompanied by a summary of the main properties of each. There are also extracts from the works of of Ibn Sina or Avicenna as he is known in the West, one of the great figures of his age whose work is the link with the modern application of such knowledge in the form of aromatherapy and sound therapy. The methods of treatment used in the bimaristans involved examining patients, taking their pulse and urine samples and recording their symptoms. On the basis of the diagnosis a holistic treatment was prescribed which, as well as medicines in the form of pills, ointments and so on, also included dietary recommendations, vapour inhalations and other treatments. Mental patients were also attended to, and one of the primary features of treatment in this area was the use of music and sound to influence the mental state of the patient. The treatment of mentally ill patients was based on five pillars:
- sunlight
- fresh air
- the sound of water – so there were fountains n the courtyard
- the colour blue which Western knowledge now acknowledges as having a calming effect
- music.
The medical consulting room houses a reconstruction of what it would have been like to receive medical attention in the bimaristan. The patient is lying on a couch in the middle of the room and the doctors surrounding him are taking his pulse and recording his symptoms. In one of the display cases are illustrations showing the blood circulation system discovered by Ibn Al-Nafis (1210-1289) over six hundred years before Harvey.
Another display item which I found remarkable were the samples of nine metals whose specific weight was calculated by Al-Biruni (973-1050). Alongside this exhibit is a chart showing the specific weights as calculated by Al-Biruni and those calculated by modern science. In most cases Al-Biruni’s calculations are absolutely accurate and, where there is any discrepancy, it is only in the second decimal point!
Other exhibits I found of particular interest were a chart showing the plants used in therapy and their main applications. I thought that perhaps they would have had a poster of that for sale but, alas, nobody seems to have thought of the commercial value of such things today. The second thing which caught my eye was a musical instrument used to treat mentally disturbed patients. It is a wooden frame with metal tubes of varying lengths hanging from the top horizontal bar. These tubes were struck with a wooden baton to produce sounds of differing pitch and resonance according to the needs of each patient.
When we left the bimaristan to buy such mundane items as fruit bowls in the souq, I could not help thinking what a pity it was that the tradition had not managed to survive just one hundred years more when it could have prospered once again with the growing interest in alternative therapies. Alas, the tradition is now virtually dead here and even the famous Damask rose is no longer grown commercially in Damascus, outside of private gardens that is, but in Turkey and Bulgaria!
August 30 1998
