<P> Institutions created specifically to care for the ill also appeared early in India . Fa Xian, a Chinese Buddhist monk who travelled across India ca . 400 AD, recorded in his travelogue that </P> <P> The heads of the Vaishya (merchant) families in them (all the kingdoms of north India) establish in the cities houses for dispensing charity and medicine . All the poor and destitute in the country, orphans, widowers, and childless men, maimed people and cripples, and all who are diseased, go to those houses, and are provided with every kind of help, and doctors examine their diseases . They get the food and medicines which their cases require, and are made to feel at ease; and when they are better, they go away of themselves . </P> <P> The earliest surviving encyclopaedia of medicine in Sanskrit is the Carakasamhita (Compendium of Caraka). This text, which describes the building of a hospital is dated by the medical historian Dominik Wujastyk to the period between 100 BCE and 150 CE . The description by Fa Xian is one of the earliest accounts of a civic hospital system anywhere in the world and this evidence, coupled with Caraka's description of how a clinic should be built and equipped, suggests that India may have been the first part of the world to have evolved an organized cosmopolitan system of institutionally - based medical provision . </P> <P> King Ashoka is wrongly said by many secondary sources to have founded at hospitals in ca . 230 BCE </P>

Where was the first hospital built in the world