Three people wearing white coats working in a laboratory. Two people at left and right are sitting down, person at centre facing away using equipment.

Researchers work in a lab of the Health for Life in Singapore (HELIOS) longitudinal study.Credit: Charlene Winfred for Nature

The hospitals of the ninth century were quite different from the plastic-and-steel environments we see today. But there are nevertheless similarities: Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, a physician working from medieval Baghdad and one of the most significant figures in the history of medicine, worked to many of the same principles, informed by the same classical medical scholars such as Hippocrates or Galen, that govern our own health care.

For instance, he made use of control groups, suggesting his colleagues use a new treatment on only half a group of patients to understand the difference a proposed medicine might cause. When asked where authorities should build a new bimaristan — a medieval Islamic hospital — he suggested meat should be hung around the city and wherever it took the longest to rot, he reasoned, was the best spot. Al-Rāzī also had a publishing history that would be the envy of many modern scholars — writing more than 200 works on many different fields of medicine and philosophy. Hospitals have been important centres of research — as well as health care — ever since.

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