Charité

The Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin is Europe´s largest University clinic, affiliated with both Humboldt University and Freie Universität Berlin. With numerous Collaborative Research Centers (CRC) of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Charité is one of Germany's most research-intensive medical institutions. For the past five years (2012 to 2017), Charité has been ranked by Focus as the best of over 1000 hospitals in Germany. More than half of all German Nobel Prize winners in Physiology or Medicine, including Emil von Behring, Robert Koch, and Paul Ehrlich came from the Charité. Its medical school is one of the most prestigious in Germany.HistoryComplying with an order of King Frederick I of Prussia from November 14, 1709, the hospital was established north of the Berlin city walls in 1710 in anticipation of an outbreak of the bubonic plague that had already depopulated East Prussia. After the plague spared the city, it came to be used as a charity hospital for the poor. On January 9, 1727 Frederick William I of Prussia gave it the name Charité, meaning "charity".The construction of an anatomical theatre in 1713 marks the beginning of the medical school, then supervised by the collegium medico-chirurgicum of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.