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The Osmania General Hospital on the north bank of the Musi was built in 1925 by the seventh Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan as the central teaching hospital of the modern Hyderabad State. Conceived together with the Osmania Medical College across the river, it formed a single hospital-and-college complex on the lines of the great European medical schools of the period. Its long Indo-Saracenic block — a granite and stucco facade with two octagonal corner towers and a deep central arch — was part of the seventh Nizam's wider rebuilding of the city after the catastrophic 1908 Musi flood, which had drowned much of the old riverside and forced a full reconsideration of Hyderabad's public infrastructure.
After the 1908 flood
Rebuilding the riverside after a catastrophic flood
The Musi flood of September 1908 killed several thousand people and swept away much of the old riverside. The seventh Nizam, then newly enthroned, commissioned the engineer Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya to plan a new system of dams and embankments, and rebuilt the river frontage with a new hospital, a new High Court, the City College frontage and the State Central Library — a single coordinated programme of public buildings.
The building
The signature architectural style of the seventh Nizam's reign
The hospital was designed in the late Indo-Saracenic manner that became the signature of the seventh Nizam's reign: deep arches drawn from the Qutb Shahi past, octagonal corner towers, tile-work spandrels and a long horizontal mass set parallel to the river. It remains one of the most distinctive institutional silhouettes of Hyderabad.
Continuing service
Still the city's principal government teaching hospital
Osmania General Hospital continues today as the principal government teaching hospital of the city, attached to Osmania Medical College. The condition of the original block has been the subject of several heritage campaigns; the building was listed in 2017 by the state heritage authority.