The Charité in Berlin is one of Europe’s oldest and largest teaching hospitals. Established outside the city walls in 1710, it was originally intended for plague victims. Just a century later, the hospital was entirely rebuilt and became the medical faculty of the University of Berlin that had just been founded. The Rudolf Virchow Krankenhaus was built in the early nineteenth century, while the late twentieth century saw the medical faculty of the Humboldt-Universität merge with the Virchow-Klinikum to form the “Universitätsklinikum Charité”. Another merger with the “Universitätsklinikum Benjamin Franklin” of the Freie Universität in 2003 led to one of Europe’s largest teaching hospitals: “Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin”. It has four major campuses where academic teaching, research and patient care are combined to form one complete whole – its motto being “research, teaching, healing, helping”.