Hospitals and Medicine in Medieval and Early Modern India

Hospitals and the practice of medicine have been known in India since long. This paper focuses on hospitals (bimaristan, darush shifa' and shifa'-khana) 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 Baburnama, illustrated during the reign of Akbar, is taken to demonstrate how imperial shifa'-khanas were organised.