Baghdad in the 9th Century was in a Golden Age, a time when “its civilization shone more brightly than any other, when its philosophers, mathematicians and doctors led the way intellectually.” But it was a time made possible by opening up to the outside world. Baghdad was “the Tokyo of its day. Many of the ideas it snapped up were foreign. Yet the Arabs adapted them brilliantly. The hospital was a Persian idea from as early as the sixth century, under the name ‘bimaristan.’ But in Baghdad the institution became much more sophisticated, with special wards for internal diseases, contagious cases and psychiatric patients.”