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Osmania Medical College is among the oldest medical colleges in India. It was founded in 1846 as the Hyderabad Medical School by the fourth Nizam Mir Farkhonda Ali Khan, renamed Mahbub Medical School under his successor, and renamed again in 1919 as Osmania Medical College in honour of the seventh Nizam, who folded it into the wider Osmania reform alongside the building of the Osmania General Hospital across the Musi. Together the college and the hospital formed a single teaching-hospital complex on the lines of the great European medical schools of the period, and it has continued in that role for more than a century.
The 1846 school
The original Hyderabad Medical School on the Musi
The original Hyderabad Medical School taught Western medicine in Urdu, with English as a secondary medium, and was attached to a small teaching hospital on the south bank of the Musi. Its first cohorts of graduates went on to serve as civil surgeons in the state and across the Deccan. It was one of the first three modern medical schools of South Asia.
Osmania reform
Raised to a degree college with its own teaching hospital
The seventh Nizam reorganised the school as Osmania Medical College in 1919, raised its syllabus to that of a full degree-granting college, and built around it the new Osmania General Hospital — completed in 1925 — as a teaching hospital on the lines of Edinburgh and Vienna. The college became one of the principal medical schools of British and princely India.
A continuing institution
Among the leading medical colleges of South India
Now affiliated to Kaloji Narayana Rao University of Health Sciences, Osmania Medical College remains one of the leading medical colleges of South India. Its original buildings, and the great Indo-Saracenic block of the Osmania General Hospital across the river, are among the most recognisable institutional silhouettes of Hyderabad.