The first thing Aziz Khan built was a practice. The second thing he built was a hospital. But before either of those, in the mid-1980s, what he built was a reputation in the dark — riding a scooter through poorly lit streets and pothole-filled roads to reach patients in neighbouring towns, his wife on the pillion seat, an ECG machine clutched between them.
The Police Officer’s Son
Aziz was born in Chandrapur. In 1973, his father served as Assistant Police Commissioner in Nagpur, and Aziz attended St. Francis de Sales College — a school that sent Nasrin Raina, Tapash Saha, Dilip Gohokar, Rajiv Garg, Murtaza Akhtar, and Sharad Jaitly to GMC Nagpur in the same year.
He arrived at GMC in 1973 and made himself useful. He served as Secretary of the Students’ Council in 1975–76 and as Secretary of the Maharashtra Association of Resident Doctors in 1981–82. He interned at Balharshah alongside Suresh Batra, Pramod Bangde, Vijay Karmarkar, and Pradeep Desai, and completed his urban internship at Civil Hospital, Chandrapur.
His MD came in 1982 from GMC Nagpur, with a thesis on renal involvement in pulmonary tuberculosis supervised by Dr. P.Y. Deshmukh. He also worked as a kidney unit registrar during his residency — a foretaste of the procedural life that cardiology would bring. Then Mumbai, and a DM in Cardiology at Grant Medical College and J.J. Hospital. He won the Ivan Pinto Gold Medal at the DM examination in 1985 — the university’s highest recognition in the subject. His mentor during the residency was Dr. Lekha Pathak.
The Second Cardiologist in Nagpur
He returned to Nagpur as only the second DM cardiologist in the city, after Dr. Uday Mahorkar. The discipline he had entered bore little resemblance to what it would become. He described it plainly:
“Those days were very different. Whenever I got a call from neighbourhoods, I used to ride a scooter to nearby towns and Nagpur city — with my wife clutching an ECG machine riding pillion. And I used to travel far and wide to see cardiac cases — placing pacemakers and offering consultations — enduring bumpy rides on poorly lit streets and pothole-filled roads.”
After a year as pool officer at Indira Gandhi Government Medical College, Nagpur, he established his cardiac hospital on 21 December 1986. He started the interventional programme at Ekvira Hospital in 1995, moved to the Superspeciality Hospital in 1997, and worked at Spandan Hospital from 1997 to 2009. In 2009 he set up his own catheterisation laboratory. Cardiac surgery followed in 2011. The original practice has grown into Crescent Hospital and Heart Center — a 60-bed facility equipped for angioplasty, pacing, and open heart surgery.
Cardiology in those years moved fast. Aziz has watched the discipline transform from one shaped by watchful waiting and clinical intuition to one in which, as he puts it, patients move from the hospital door to the cath lab faster than a limited-overs cricket match runs through twenty overs. His team at Crescent restores arrhythmias, repairs congenital defects, and fixes the valves that time and disease have choked or torn.
What Remained
In October 2012, Aziz’s wife Seema Sarwar died. She was an MD microbiologist. They had built the hospital together — the scooter rides, the pillion seat, the ECG machine had been her contribution as much as his. She died on 14 October 2012.
His daughter Sumera trained at GMC Nagpur, obtained her MD in Paediatrics, and now teaches in the department at GMC. She married Dr. Kasif Syed, an interventional cardiologist at Crescent Hospital — the craft passing, in its way, from one generation to the next under the same roof. His son Atif studied electronics in Nagpur, earned a master’s degree from the University of Southern California, and works in Fremont, California.
The hospital that began with a scooter and a borrowed ECG machine is now a centre that other cardiologists work within, that trains residents, and that Aziz’s son-in-law extends further. Not much about it resembles those dark roads in the mid-1980s. But the impulse behind it — reach the patient, fix the problem, go home — has not changed.