Hospitals and Medicine in Medieval and Early Modern India

Abstract

Hospitals and the practice of medicine have been known in India since long. This paper focuses on hospitals (bīmāristān, dārush shifā’ and shifā’-khāna) that were established during the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries in the Indian subcontinent. This is a theme that needs to be studied, for our primary sources do reveal some information about these institutions. The help of a miniature from Bāburnāma, illustrated during the reign of Akbar, is taken to demonstrate how imperial shifā’-khānas were organised.