The Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (Charité – Berlin University of Medicine) is one of Europe's largest university hospitals, affiliated with Humboldt University and Free University Berlin. With numerous Collaborative Research Centres of the German Research Foundation it is one of Germany's most research-intensive medical institutions. From 2012 to 2022, it was ranked by Focus as the best of over 1000 hospitals in Germany. In 2019 to 2022 Newsweek ranked the Charité as the 5th best hospital in the world, and the best in Europe. More than half of all German Nobel Prize winners in Physiology or Medicine, including Emil von Behring, Robert Koch and Paul Ehrlich, have worked at the Charité. Several politicians and diplomats have been treated at the Charité, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who underwent meniscus treatment at the Orthopaedic Department, Yulia Tymoshenko from Ukraine, and more recently Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who received treatment at the hospital due to his poisoning in August 2020. In 2010–11 the medical schools of Humboldt University and Freie Universität Berlin were united under the roof of the Charité. The admission rate of the reorganized medical school was 3.9% for the 2019–2020 academic year. QS World University Rankings 2019 ranked the Charité Medical School as number one for medicine in Germany and ninth best in Europe. It was also considered the best medical school in Germany by Times Higher Education 2021, being the eighth in Europe. History Complying with an order of King Frederick I of Prussia from 14 November 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 9 January 1727, King Frederick William I of Prussia gave it the name "Charité", French for "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. In the 19th century, after the University of Berlin (today Humboldt University) was founded in 1810, the dean of the medical college Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland integrated the Charité as a teaching hospital in 1828. During this time it became home to such notable medical pioneers as Rudolf Virchow, known as "the father of modern pathology" and whose name is