Overview
Charite – Medical University of Berlin is one of the largest university hospitals in Europe. All of our clinical care, research and teaching is delivered by physicians and researchers of the highest international standard. Charité proudly lays claim to more than half of all German Nobel Prize winners in Physiology or Medicine, including Emil von Behring, Robert Koch, and Paul Ehrlich. Charité is internationally renowned for its excellence in teaching and training. Charite – Medical University of Berlin represents a single medical faculty, which serves both Humboldt Universtität zu Berlin and Freie Universität Berlin. Charité extends over four campuses, and has close to 100 different Departments and Institutes, which make up a total of 17 different CharitéCenters. Having marked its 300-year anniversary in 2010, Charité is now one of the largest employers in Berlin, employing 13,200 staff (or 16,850 if including its subsidiaries), and with a total annual turnover of €1.6 billion.
History
Complying 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.
After the University of Berlin (today Humboldt University) had been founded in 1810, the dean of the medical college Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland integrated the Charité as a teaching hospital in 1828
