Patients deposited their street clothes with the hospital authorities for safe keeping, before donning special ward clothes and being assigned to their beds. Each patient would also have his or her own medical record.

Hospitals like these flourished as Muslim rulers competed to see who could construct the most dvanced centres. They spread all over the Muslim world reaching Sicily and North Africa.The earliest Muslim hospitals were funded by charitable religious endowments, called waqf, and some money from the state coffers was also used to maintain some hospitals.