Every medieval society had to answer the same question: who looks after the sick, and who pays? In Latin Europe the answer began in the monastery. Chapter 36 of the Rule of St Benedict told monks that before all things and above all things care must be taken of the sick, and the ideal monastery drawn on the Plan of Saint Gall (c. 820–830) set aside an infirmary, a physician's house, a bloodletting house and a medicinal herb garden. Guest houses for pilgrims grew into hospitals, and institutions such as the Hôtel-Dieu of Paris, first recorded in 829, are still running today. In the Islamic world the bimaristan — Persian for “place of the sick” — became a large, endowed, professional institution. Baghdad's al-Adudi hospital opened in 981 with twenty-five specialists and trained new doctors; Nur al-Din's bimaristan in Damascus (1156) was the first to keep patient records; and Cairo's al-Mansuri hospital (1284), funded by a charitable endowment, could hold some 8,000 beds, treated patients free of charge regardless of religion or status, and gave them money on discharge. In Song China, the state itself stepped in. After the poet-official Su Shi set up a sick-house in Hangzhou around 1089, Emperor Huizong ordered public hospitals, the anjifang, across the empire in 1102; patients were placed in separate rooms by severity, and every doctor kept a record of cures and failures that was reviewed at the end of each year. Faith, endowment and the state: three foundations for the same act of care.