TTWSYF: Fulltime student-This is the first paragraph from your link from above. This first paragraph indicates that Christian monasteries were first, doesn't it? Funny, you left that out.
Yes! I deliberately did not quote the first paragraph. But. it was not funny at all, TTWSYF! Do christians like you, ever stop to think about why things are written the way they are?
Let's take a closer look at that first paragraph.
Quote: "The hospital was one of the great achievements of medieval Islamic society. The relation of the design and development of Islamic hospitals to the earlier and contemporaneous poor and sick relief facilities offered by some Christian monasteries has not been fully delineated. Clearly, however, the medieval Islamic hospital was a more elaborate institution with a wider range of functions."
The above author was acknowledging that little is known about the (quote) "poor and sick relief facilities offered by some Christian monasteries." And, I did not want to further complicate a difficult research area by discussing the development of Christian monasteries. So let's do that now!
Strange christian believers were soon evident in early christianity, apparently trying to emulate the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness. They began to live in caves, in trees, on top of poles, etc. Later some started to live these sort of lives in small groups (maybe demonstrating that insanity can be infectious - smile).
St. Pachomius is usually credited with the establisment of the first cenoitic (community-based) christian monastery in 346 CE at (possibly) Tabenna in Egypt. His intention apparently was to allow individiuals who lacked the skills to survive alone in the desert, to live in an organised community.
You can easily imagine, that in time, some of these monks would need nursing, either because of advanced age or sustaining an injury. So now think of JW bethel homes, some, at least, by all accounts, had 'sick bays.' Can these be called hospitals? Could the similar sick bays, in those first monasteries be called "hospitals?" Maybe now you may understand where the author of the cited text was going when he wrote that sentence. And, why I chose not to discuss that connection. For your punishment for your lack of critical thinking, you can read this explanation now!!!!
If you want to class a 'sick bay' in a monastery as the equivalent of a modern hospital, go ahead, but I suggest that there is a world of difference between a monastic sick bay and the described Islamic hospital of that article.
However, even if you accept that monastic sick bay as a hospital, it still does not mean that christians developed the first hospitals, as the subsequent quotations I offered make clear, the pagan Greeks and Romans had developed an equivalent to the modern hospital in the temples associated with Asclepius and known as asclepieions, well before Jesus was a twinkle in YHWH's eye.
And.by the way, Asclepius's symbol (the rod of Asclepius, a rod with a serpent entwined) is still used as a synbal of medicine, to this day. And the names of his daughters are still associated with aspects of medicine. His daughters were:
1. Hygieia ("Hygiene", the goddess/personification of health, cleanliness, and sanitation).
2. Iaso (the goddess of recuperation from illness).
3. .Aceso (the goddess of the healing process).
4. Aglæa/Ægle (the goddess of the glow of good health),
5, Panacea (the goddess of universal remedy).
But let's back track now and ask the question, from where could these early Christians have gotten the idea of a monastic community?
St. Pachomius, lived in Egypt, and the Red sea Egyptian coast had strong trade links to India. India was where Buddhism developed, and Buddhists are known to have established monasteries, (as well as a missionary network) from as early as the 4th century BCE. We know that Buddhists were preaching in Egypt in Roman times, and its' easy to imagine that people knew of the concept of monastic communities from their knowledge of Buddhists.
So it is interesting to read the Wikipedia (for convenience) entry on "History of Hospitals."
Quote: "Institutions created specifically to care for the ill also appeared early in India. Fa Xian, a Chinese Buddhist monk who travelled across India ca. 400 AD, recorded in his travelogue [5] that
The heads of the Vaishya [merchant] families in them [all the kingdoms of north India] establish in the cities houses for dispensing charity and medicine. All the poor and destitute in the country, orphans, widowers, and childless men, maimed people and cripples, and all who are diseased, go to those houses, and are provided with every kind of help, and doctors examine their diseases. They get the food and medicines which their cases require, and are made to feel at ease; and when they are better, they go away of themselves.
The earliest surviving encyclopaedia of medicine in Sanskrit is the Carakasamhita (Compendium of Caraka). This text, which describes the building of a hospital is dated by the medical historian Dominik Wujastyk to the period between 100 BCE and 150 CE.[6] The description by Fa Xian is one of the earliest accounts of a civic hospital system anywhere in the world and this evidence, coupled with Caraka’s description of how a clinic should be built and equipped, suggests that India may have been the first part of the world to have evolved an organized cosmopolitan system of institutionally-based medical provision.[7]
King Ashoka is wrongly said by many secondary sources to have founded at hospitals in ca. 230 BCE[8]
According to the Mahavamsa, the ancient chronicle of Sinhalese royalty, written in the sixth century CE, King Pandukabhaya of Sri Lanka (reigned 437 BCE to 367 BCE) had lying-in-homes and hospitals (Sivikasotthi-Sala) built in various parts of the country. This is the earliest documentary evidence we have of institutions specifically dedicated to the care of the sick anywhere in the world.[9][10] Mihintale Hospital is the oldest in the world.[11]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hospitals
One lesson to take away from this discussion is that all the evidence in antiquity points to a sharing of information from differernt sources and traditions. There is no 'long line of a true religion' in hiustory.
