The bimaristan was the Islamic city hospital, a purpose-built and endowment-funded institution that admitted patients regardless of faith or means and combined treatment, teaching and pharmacy under one roof. The first documented general hospital was founded in Baghdad around 805 under the caliph Harun al-Rashid and his vizier Yahya ibn Khalid, and by the year 1000 the city had several more. Major bimaristans had separate wards for different conditions, salaried physicians, libraries and lecture rooms, functioning as both clinic and medical school. Later foundations such as Cairo's vast Mansuri hospital of 1284 set new standards for scale and free, universal care.
The bimaristan established the hospital as a permanent, secular, teaching institution of the city, a model that passed through Sicily and Spain into the medieval European hospital. It fixed organised public health and medical education as a civic building type centuries before comparable institutions in the West.