Early Islam and healthcare

[WinterHold]

While the Muslim world didn't have the first hospitals, they certainly had the best ones.  This is pretty common knowledge.

Not sure what the quality of Muslim hospitals had to do with crusaders eating Muslims, though.

Boru

He refers to some seiges where the crusaders had little resort but to resort to cannabilism. While this did happen, a myth has spawned from the unfortunate event that claims christians eat muslims as a matter of course. This is, of course false. The christians would have eaten anything they could lay hands upon. The Siege of Maa'rat, for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Ma%27arra

A chronicler, Radulph of Caen in his contemporaneous account, Gesta Tancredi wrote, "Some people said that, constrained by the lack of food, they boiled pagan adults in cooking-pots, impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled." These events were also chronicled by Fulcher of Chartres, who wrote:

I shudder to tell that many of our people, harassed by the madness of excessive hunger, cut pieces from the buttocks of the Saracens already dead there, which they cooked, but when it was not yet roasted enough by the fire, they devoured it with savage mouth.[1]

The events described by Radulph of Caen have been disputed. The famine and cannibalism are recognised as described by Fulcher of Chartres, but the torture and the killing of Muslim captives for cannibalism by Radulph of Caen are very unlikely since no Arab or Muslim records of the events exist. Had they occurred, they would have probably been recorded. That has been noted by BBC Timewatch series, the episode The Crusades: A Timewatch Guide, which included experts Dr Thomas Asbridge and Muslim Arabic historian Fozia Bora, who state that Radulph of Caen's description does not appear in any contemporary Muslim chronicle.[2][3][4]

Another source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades

The crusaders became so deprived at times they are thought to have resorted to cannibalism.[90]

another source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_in...annibalism

• Crusaders were reported to have practiced cannibalism during the Siege of Ma'arra.[3]

  
  
  

another source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_cannibalism

Reports of cannibalism were recorded during the First Crusade, as Crusaders were alleged to have fed on the bodies of their dead opponents following the Siege of Ma'arra.