Site during pre-college years The college's original building was built prior to the
Partition of Bengal of 1905. In 1904, the building was being used as the secretariat (headquarters) of the newly formed provinces of
East Bengal and
Assam. In 1921, it was turned over to the
University of Dhaka, which was founded that year. Part of the building was used as the university's medical center, another as the students' dormitory, and the rest as the office of the administrative wing of the Arts faculty. In 1939, the
Dhaka University Council requested the British government to establish a separate medical college in Dhaka. The proposal was postponed because of the onset of the Second World War. The new academic and hospital building, Dhaka Medical College Hospital-2, was inaugurated by Prime Minister
Sheikh Hasina on 3 October 2013. The country's first ever
autologous bone marrow transplant took place in its bone marrow transplant unit.
Origin of 'K' Every student batch, or class, of Dhaka Medical College is tagged with the prefix
K along with a number. The first year, the beginning batch of the college, was named K-1, likewise the second year as K-2, the third year as K-3, the fourth year as K-4, and the fifth year as K-5. In 2021, DMC hosted its 78th batch, hence branded as K-78. Many theories exist about the origin of the letter K, the most popular being that K stands for
Kolkata, as many students of DMC's earlier batches migrated from
Calcutta Medical College. Although Kolkata was
officially known as Calcutta until 2001, the city was widely pronounced as Kolkata/Kolikata in Bengali. Though the first ten medical schools did not follow this tradition, yet another theory proposes that, as the institute was the 11th medical school in the
Indian subcontinent, K, the 11th letter of the English alphabet, is used to represent that. ==Undergraduate course==