ABSTRACT
When I started this project I found it difficult to visualize the history of medical institutions across time, let alone across space, so I constructed the comparative timeline (Figure 1 and Appendix A) based on a wide variety of secondary sources. 1 As no history has been written of the hospital per se in China, the question arose: which Chinese to include? I resolved this issue by incorporating any which, had they occurred in Europe, would have been included by a historian of the hospital in the West. In fact, I have been more rigorous in the case of China by counting only those institutions that had some association with the provision of medical care.
