A group of more than 200 lawyers, who had ongoing issues with the doctors of the Punjab Institute of Cardiology, stormed the hospital, vandalising property and damaging dozens of vehicles of visitors and setting ablaze a police van, Rashid said.
The incident was apparently triggered by video clips some doctors had made ridiculing the lawyers.
Zulfikar Hameed, the Lahore city police chief, said the lawyers also smashed window panes and doors and equipment at the cardiology hospital.
Some of the protesters fired gunshots and pelted arriving police with stones and bricks, according to a hospital doctor, Ashraf Nizami.
Several lawyers were arrested, police said.
"It was catastrophic for hours," Nizami said, adding that a 70-year-old female patient had died, and several patients were left unattended for hours, during the violence.
Nizami said the attackers forced doctors and nurses to flee, leaving patients in emergency and intensive care unattended.
Police fired tear gas to quell the mob while terrified patients and hospital staff fled to safety, officials said.
Lahore government official Kamran Ali said the lawyers were enraged over what they said was the beating by doctors of a lawyer at the hospital over his refusal to get in a queue of patients.
He said the lawyers were particularly angry about the doctors disseminating a mobile phone video on social media showing the beating.
The protesters also roughed up provincial information minister Fayaz-ul-Hasan Chauhan when he got to the scene and tried to negotiate with the lawyers.
"This was kind of a high-handedness which none of civilised societies can tolerate," provincial law minister Raja Basharat said.
Prime Minister Imran Khan's office launched an investigation into the incident. "It is a shame that some people would go and attack a hospital," his spokesman Nadeem Afzal Chan said.
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