Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/84

68 68 A Short History of Nursing During the five hundred years when education was at its most restricted phase in Europe, Sara- cenic learning, arts, and sciences enjoyed their brilliant period. The Arabs translated the works of Hippocrates and Galen. Though the study of anatomy was discouraged by their religion, they became masters of clinical medicine and trained many skilled physicians. They added little that was new to medical science, but preserved the best of the old. They excelled in chemistry, and tested the fluids of the body. They studied drugs, and added new remedies to the materia medica. They had many beautiful hospitals, in which patients were intelligently classified in separate wards. They received lepers, and the insane, and treated them with skill and kindness. They be- came especially eminent as oculists, and had ad- mirable provision for eye cases and for the blind. They carried on a form of hospital social service by providing needful care for discharged patients who were not quite able to work, and had systems of free medical attention for the poor of the cities. Alexandria, Damascus, Bagdad, and Spanish cities had such centres of medicine. Cordova alone, in the twelfth century, had seventeen universities, and fifty medical institutions. Jews, who were excluded from other opportunities, studied in