Ebook: Hospitals in Iran and India, 1500-1950s

This volume looks at hospitals in the post-medieval Indo-Iranian world from various perspectives. During the Safavid-Mughal periods hospitals were still tied to Avicennian medicine. However, in Qajar Iran and British India hospitals became important instruments for the spread of modern Western medicine. The papers in this volume present a significant panorama on the history of medicine and medical institutions in Iran and India during the early modern and the modern periods. The portrait that emerges is not homogeneous, but instead shows ambivalent and contrasting images. Hospitals can be seen as powerful symbols of the Muslim scientific civilization and then of modern medicine, nevertheless, they remained institutions relegated to the fringes of society – regarded with suspicion and usually reserved for the poor.
Contributors include: Cristiana Bastos, Willem Floor, Claudia Preckel, Omid Rezai, Fabrizio Speziale, Hasan Tadjbakhsh, Anna Vanzan

This book is copublished with the Institut Français de Recherche en Iran (IFRI) as no. 74 in the Bibliothéque Iranienne series.