The modern concept of the hospital was introduced by Muslims.
The medicine of the medieval Islamic civilization was built primarily on Greek medicine, in particular the writings of Hippocrates and Galen. The most significant contribution of the Islamic civilization to medicine was the establishment of the hospital for the treatment of patients and for training of physicians. Hospices for the sick, poor, travelers, and orphans had existed in Byzantium and were the model for the Umayyad caliph Walid’s (reigned 705-715) charitable institution for the care of lepers, the blind, and the inform.
The first hospital however, was built in Baghdad by Harun al-Rashid (reigned 786-809). This was soon followed by several other hospitals all over the Islamic world including the Adudi hospital in Baghdad, which was founded in 982. Another great hospital, the Nasiri hospital of Cairo, was completed in 1284. It had separate wards for fever, opthalmia, surgical cases, and dysentery, and also housed a pharmacy, a mosque, and a library. It had a large administrative staff, lecture halls and attendants of both genders.
Source: A.Nanji, “Muslim Philosophy and the Sciences,”
Ismailimail 
“As early as the 1lth century, Islamic hospitals maintained special wards for the insane. They treated them kindly and presumed their disease was real at a time when the insane were routinely burned alive in Europe as witches and sorcerers. A curative approach was taken for mental illness and, for the first time in history, the mentally ill were treated with supportive care, drugs and psychotherapy. Every major Islamic city maintained an insane asylum where patients were treated at no charge. In fact, the Islamic system for the treatment of the insane excels in comparison to the current model, as it was more humane and was highly effective as well.”:
From:
http://darvish.wordpress.com/2008/02/21/early-muslim-science-and-invention-teach-your-children/
(Published on the Ismaili Mail section of this website)
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Relevant quotes to the idea of hospitals and helping people and adding to the information gained from past civilizations:
Quotes of Aga Khan IV:
“A thousand years ago, my forefathers, the Fatimid imam-caliphs of Egypt, founded al-Azhar University and the Academy of Knowledge in Cairo. In the Islamic tradition, they viewed the discovery of knowledge as a way to understand, so as to serve better God’s creation, to apply knowledge and reason to build society and shape human aspirations”(Aga Khan IV, Speech, 25th June 2004, Matola, Mozambique.)
“From the seventh century to the thirteenth century, the Muslim civilizations dominated world culture, accepting, adopting, using and preserving all preceding study of mathematics, philosophy, medicine and astronomy, among other areas of learning. The Islamic field of thought and knowledge included and added to much of the information on which all civilisations are founded. And yet this fact is seldom acknowledged today, be it in the West or in the Muslim world, and this amnesia has left a six hundred year gap in the history of human thought” (Aga Khan IV, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, 1996)
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