The complex is spread over four campuses and comprises around 3,000 beds, 15,500 staff, 8,000 students, and more than 60 operating theaters, and has a turnover of two billion euros annually.

Rudolf Virchow was the founder of cellular pathology, while Robert Koch developed vaccines for anthrax, cholera, and tuberculosis.

[6] 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.

In 2010–2011 the medical schools of Humboldt University and Freie Universität Berlin were united under the roof of the Charité.

[8] 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.

During this time it became home to such notable medical pioneers as Rudolf Virchow, known as "the father of modern pathology"[10] and whose name is given to the eponymous "Virchow's Method" of autopsy;[11] the Swiss psychiatrist and neurologist Otto Binswanger, whose work in vascular dementia led to the discovery of Binswanger's Disease—so coined by his colleague Alois Alzheimer;[12] Robert Koch, who identified the specific causative agents of tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax; and Emil von Behring, widely known as a "saviour of children"[13] for his 1894 discovery of a diphtheria antitoxin at a time when diphtheria was a major cause of child death (among many others).

Though the majority of its original and pre-war structure was damaged or destroyed during the war, it nevertheless was used as a Red Army hospital.

The Erasmus Exchange Programme offered to Charité Medical School students includes 72 universities and is the largest in Europe.

It is a "foundation that aims to promote science and research of top international caliber in Berlin and to establish the city as a centre of scientific excellence".