The Pantokrator hospital in Constantinople

Emperor John II Komnenos built the monastery of Christ Pantokrator on a hill in the north central part of Constantinople. Its triple church survives in Istanbul as the Zeyrek Kilise Camii mosque. His typikon, the founding charter, is dated October 1136, and 20 of its chapters regulate a hospital attached to the monastery. The same foundation ran a home for 24 old and infirm men and a leper house on a separate site.

The hospital was to shelter 50 bedridden patients: ten beds for wounds and fractures, eight for eye disease, stomach complaints and other acute and painful illness, twelve for women, and the rest for the moderately ill. The beds were grouped into five wards, each with a spare bed for emergencies, and six more beds had mattresses pierced through the middle for patients who could not move. Every bed had a mat, a mattress, a pillow and a coverlet, with two goat-hair blankets in winter. Spare shirts and cloaks let patients' own clothes be washed and kept until discharge.

Each ward had two doctors, three certified assistants, two auxiliary assistants and two orderlies. The women's ward added a female doctor with female assistants and orderlies. Four more doctors, two physicians and two surgeons, treated patients who came in from outside. The doctors worked in two groups serving alternate months. They were barred from other work and from leaving the city to treat members of the ruling class, even the emperor's relatives. The staff list also named a chief pharmacist, three druggists, five washerwomen, two cooks, two bakers, four undertakers and a drain cleaner. Patients bathed twice a week if the doctors prescribed it, and a salaried teacher was to instruct the hospital's student doctors in medicine or lose his food allowance.

The typikon lays down what was meant to happen, not what did. It survives only in two eighteenth-century copies, one in Paris and one made in 1749 now in the Patriarchal Library in Istanbul. Timothy Miller took an optimistic view of how the hospital actually worked. Petros Bouras-Vallianatos, drawing on work by Peregrine Horden and Ewald Kislinger, wrote in 2021 that the evidence suggests it did not survive beyond 1150, perhaps because so large a staff was hard to sustain. Late in the fifteenth century the church was converted into a mosque.