I don't think it's too far fetched to assume that the Al-Adudi Hospital was founded based on an nascent sense of Germ Theory. Allow me to explain:
To quote the wikipedia source: "hanging a piece of meat in several places for a few days and deciding in favor of the place where meat was found to be least infected." Infected definition = "contaminated with an infective agent (such as a bacterium or virus)."
I think they could likely see some infective agents such as flies, maggots, and spoilage in meat, and translate this to their own flesh as analogous to meat. In terms of theory, my best guess is simply one of "meat goes bad when it is infected by parasites (i.e. maggots as well as perhaps stuff we do not/cannot see)"
Note that per [1] "Basic forms of germ theory were proposed in the late Middle Ages by physicians including Ibn Sina in 1025"
Whereas, from OP's source: "The Al-Adudi Hospital was founded in 981 by the then ruler of Baghdad, Adud al-Dawlah, and was also named after him"
Given the proximity of those dates (981 vs 1025)-- the proposal of Germ Theory by Middle Eastern (specifically, Persian in the case of Ibn Sina) doctors, and the hospital's founding in the near Middle Eastern region of Turkey a few years decades earlier, and the prolific nature of science in the Medieval Islamic-sphere of influence/Middle Eastern world, I think it's a decently strong argument that the basis is very early germ theory.
> Note that per [1] "Basic forms of germ theory were proposed in the late Middle Ages by physicians including Ibn Sina in 1025"
Note that also per [1] germ theory was stated pretty well in the first century BC:
> The Roman statesman Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC) wrote, in his Rerum rusticarum libri III (Three Books on Agriculture, 36 BC): "Precautions must also be taken in the neighborhood of swamps […] because there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases."
This doesn't really differ from the germ theory of disease as we understand it today.
The difference is that the Romans had no way of telling if their theory was right, it was based on guesses. Plato considered whether matter was continuous or discontinuous 400 years earlier and he settled on discontinuous, and the properties of the "atoms" as he called them were what gave macroscopic matter its properties. But the Greeks had no way of detecting atoms.
But when the microscope was discovered in the 17th century people looked at microorganisms and found that the grosser the sample the more microorganisms you could find. That was material to work with, and the germ theory followed in due course.
> The difference is that the Romans had no way of telling if their theory was right, it was based on guesses.
That's true, but it doesn't stop people from doing things that are "correct" based on the theory.
> But the Greeks had no way of detecting atoms.
There's an experiment in which you pour oil over water with a movable constraint on one side. As you enlarge the area available to the oil, it will eventually become unable to cover the water, suggesting that it is not infinitely divisible. This is well within the means of the Ancient Greeks.
Oil molecules are gargantuan monstrosities, not atoms, but I think it's similar enough to count.
You can explain away the oil monolayer experiment with surface tension. Anyway, this experiment works best if the oil is dissolved in a large quantity of petrol and it's fairly certain that the Greeks did not know distillation.
More compelling would be Brownian motion. Glass was known in the Hellenistic era, and the Romans were expert stonecutters. The principles of optics were known to the Ancient Greeks, and some guy could have made lenses and assembled them into a microscope. Unfortunately that path was not taken until the 1600s, but the technology was all there.
>This doesn't really differ from the germ theory of disease as we understand it today.
I disagree. Germ theory also covers stuff like non-airborne transmission (food/water/bodily fluids). The only thing that it got right is "you can get infected by invisible things in the air", but even then it's not that accurate. Do people really get sick from the air near swamps, or is it the mosquitoes?
> Germ theory also covers stuff like non-airborne transmission (food/water/bodily fluids).
First, that's not correct; the germ theory of disease is simply the statement that diseases are caused by germs as opposed to being caused in some other way. Transmission is not a part of it.
Second, if you believe that small creatures too small to see can make you sick if you inhale them, it's not really a stretch to think that those creatures can make you sick if they get into your body by any other means.
(Note that not all apparent diseases are caused by germs; some are caused by genetic conditions, some are caused by dietary deficiencies, some are caused by inorganic poisons, and some are caused by creatures which are easily large enough to see with the naked eye. Does this make the "germ theory of disease" incorrect?)
To quote the wikipedia source: "hanging a piece of meat in several places for a few days and deciding in favor of the place where meat was found to be least infected." Infected definition = "contaminated with an infective agent (such as a bacterium or virus)."
I think they could likely see some infective agents such as flies, maggots, and spoilage in meat, and translate this to their own flesh as analogous to meat. In terms of theory, my best guess is simply one of "meat goes bad when it is infected by parasites (i.e. maggots as well as perhaps stuff we do not/cannot see)"
Note that per [1] "Basic forms of germ theory were proposed in the late Middle Ages by physicians including Ibn Sina in 1025"
Whereas, from OP's source: "The Al-Adudi Hospital was founded in 981 by the then ruler of Baghdad, Adud al-Dawlah, and was also named after him"
Given the proximity of those dates (981 vs 1025)-- the proposal of Germ Theory by Middle Eastern (specifically, Persian in the case of Ibn Sina) doctors, and the hospital's founding in the near Middle Eastern region of Turkey a few years decades earlier, and the prolific nature of science in the Medieval Islamic-sphere of influence/Middle Eastern world, I think it's a decently strong argument that the basis is very early germ theory.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease