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Al-Adudi Hospital

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Re: Al-Adudi Hospital

#21

Post by HarryHirsch »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #12
aeoleonn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's too far fetched to assume that the Al-Adudi Hospital was founded based on an nascent sense of Germ Theory. Allow me to explain: To quote the wikipedia source: "hanging a piece of meat in several places for a few days and deciding in favor of the place where meat was found to be least infected." Infected definition = "contaminated with an infective agent (such as a bacterium or virus)." I think they…

> Note that per [1] "Basic forms of germ theory were proposed in the late Middle Ages by physicians including Ibn Sina in 1025" Note that also per [1] germ theory was stated pretty well in the first century BC: > The Roman statesman Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC) wrote, in his Rerum rusticarum libri III (Three Books on Agriculture, 36 BC): "Precautions must also be taken in the neighborhood of swamps […] because…

The difference is that the Romans had no way of telling if their theory was right, it was based on guesses. Plato considered whether matter was continuous or discontinuous 400 years earlier and he settled on discontinuous, and the properties of the "atoms" as he called them were what gave macroscopic matter its properties. But the Greeks had no way of detecting atoms.

But when the microscope was discovered in the 17th century people looked at microorganisms and found that the grosser the sample the more microorganisms you could find. That was material to work with, and the germ theory followed in due course.

Re: Al-Adudi Hospital

#22

Post by gruez »

im3w1l wrote: post #18
gruez wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very far from the truth imo. There are diseases that are airborne, but most aren't spread by rotting organic matter. It also ignores the other routes of infection (eg. food/water). The only thing it got right was "disease can spread through air". The magnitude of the effect is probably off too. AFAIK the miasma was thought to extend at least a few hundred feet (ie. encompassing entire neighborhoods), but I don't…

How far the disease can spread would depend on sources and sinks, no? If you have a huge pile of infected dead bodies in a "bowl shaped terrain" with little wind, maybe that would do it? Add a temperature inversion* for good measure. https://i2.wp.com/www.naturphilosophie.co.uk/wp-content/uplo...

>How far the disease can spread would depend on sources and sinks, no?

By air alone? How far can it possibly spread? Can you get measles if you walked within 100ft of a mass grave? miasma theory would say yes, but I doubt that's actually the case.

If you include other forms of transmission (eg. insects, animals, food/water), then it can definitely spread miles away, but this goes back to my original point of only being correct about disease being (loosely) correlated by distance. But even then it gets a bunch of stuff wrong. A rat with the bubonic plague stowed away on a ship can infect people hundreds of miles away, for instance. You could also live next to a mass grave and be fine as long as you have mesh windows and boiled your drinking water.

Re: Al-Adudi Hospital

#23

Post by thaumasiotes »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #21
thaumasiotes wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Note that per [1] "Basic forms of germ theory were proposed in the late Middle Ages by physicians including Ibn Sina in 1025" Note that also per [1] germ theory was stated pretty well in the first century BC: > The Roman statesman Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC) wrote, in his Rerum rusticarum libri III (Three Books on Agriculture, 36 BC): "Precautions must also be taken in the neighborhood of swamps […] because…

The difference is that the Romans had no way of telling if their theory was right, it was based on guesses. Plato considered whether matter was continuous or discontinuous 400 years earlier and he settled on discontinuous, and the properties of the "atoms" as he called them were what gave macroscopic matter its properties. But the Greeks had no way of detecting atoms. But when the microscope was discovered in the 17t…

> The difference is that the Romans had no way of telling if their theory was right, it was based on guesses.

That's true, but it doesn't stop people from doing things that are "correct" based on the theory.

> But the Greeks had no way of detecting atoms.

There's an experiment in which you pour oil over water with a movable constraint on one side. As you enlarge the area available to the oil, it will eventually become unable to cover the water, suggesting that it is not infinitely divisible. This is well within the means of the Ancient Greeks.

Oil molecules are gargantuan monstrosities, not atoms, but I think it's similar enough to count.

Re: Al-Adudi Hospital

#24

Post by aitchnyu »

Someone wrote: post #6
geogra4 wrote: post #3

Fascinating stuff. I wonder what kind of theory of disease they were working under

I would guess miasma theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory : “The miasma theory (also called the miasmatic theory) is an obsolete medical theory that held that diseases—such as cholera, chlamydia, or the Black Death—were caused by a miasma (μίασμα, Ancient Greek for "pollution"), a noxious form of "bad air", also known as night air. The theory held that epidemics were caused by miasma, emanating from ro…

Marcus Aurelius wrote about "disturbed air" around 160 AD, about the Antonine Plague that killed a significant portion of military and civilians.

> For corruption of understanding is much more a plague than such a distemper and change of this environing atmosphere; for this is a plague to animals, as animate beings, that is a plague to men, as human beings.

Re: Al-Adudi Hospital

#25

Post by im3w1l »

gruez wrote: post #22
im3w1l wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How far the disease can spread would depend on sources and sinks, no? If you have a huge pile of infected dead bodies in a "bowl shaped terrain" with little wind, maybe that would do it? Add a temperature inversion* for good measure. https://i2.wp.com/www.naturphilosophie.co.uk/wp-content/uplo...

>How far the disease can spread would depend on sources and sinks, no? By air alone? How far can it possibly spread? Can you get measles if you walked within 100ft of a mass grave? miasma theory would say yes, but I doubt that's actually the case. If you include other forms of transmission (eg. insects, animals, food/water), then it can definitely spread miles away, but this goes back to my original point of only bei…

It's a good point about other forms of transmission, but I think the air alone is an interesting question.

What would be the limiting factor on how far it can spread? Do the particles deactivate after a while in the air? Or is it that the concentration is not high enough? Latter case, wind patterns would matter a lot.

Surely, when authorities talk about diseases being able to spread x many feet, it ignores many factors and is meant to be an actionable simplification that works in a statistical sense.

Re: Al-Adudi Hospital

#26

Post by golergka »

taejo wrote: post #17
golergka wrote: post #16

That's some pretty awesome engineering thinking: don't have a theory to explain phenomena? No problem, still can do useful things without it!

How do you come up with this in the first place without elements of a theory like: + the causes of disease are the same as the causes of meat rotting + that cause is localised in space, and stays there over time

That's just intuition, not a complete theory.

Re: Al-Adudi Hospital

#27

Post by HarryHirsch »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #23
HarryHirsch wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that the Romans had no way of telling if their theory was right, it was based on guesses. Plato considered whether matter was continuous or discontinuous 400 years earlier and he settled on discontinuous, and the properties of the "atoms" as he called them were what gave macroscopic matter its properties. But the Greeks had no way of detecting atoms. But when the microscope was discovered in the 17t…

> The difference is that the Romans had no way of telling if their theory was right, it was based on guesses. That's true, but it doesn't stop people from doing things that are "correct" based on the theory. > But the Greeks had no way of detecting atoms. There's an experiment in which you pour oil over water with a movable constraint on one side. As you enlarge the area available to the oil, it will eventually becom…

You can explain away the oil monolayer experiment with surface tension. Anyway, this experiment works best if the oil is dissolved in a large quantity of petrol and it's fairly certain that the Greeks did not know distillation.

More compelling would be Brownian motion. Glass was known in the Hellenistic era, and the Romans were expert stonecutters. The principles of optics were known to the Ancient Greeks, and some guy could have made lenses and assembled them into a microscope. Unfortunately that path was not taken until the 1600s, but the technology was all there.

Re: Al-Adudi Hospital

#28

Post by commonturtle »

> Within Baghdad, the Al-Adudi Hospital's location was decided upon by its administrator, Abu-Bakr al-Razi. He determined where it should be located by "hanging a piece of meat in several places for a few days and deciding in favor of the place where meat was found to be least infected."

That is actually quite a clever idea. I wonder what factors would lead to one location having higher microbe density than others? Probably things like nearby sewers, meat / fish markets, etc.

Re: Al-Adudi Hospital

#29

Post by lostlogin »

The section about hospitals on Cairo is interesting, universal free healthcare with lost wages covered.

The healthcare may have been primitive but the policy goes further than what a lot of countries offer today.

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