Brigham and Women's Hospital: Encyclopedia - Brigham and Women's Hospital

Brigham and Women's Hospital

Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) is a hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. With Massachusetts General Hospital, it is one of the two founding members of Partners HealthCare. Brigham and Women's is a major teaching affiliate (and directly adjacent to the campus) of Harvard Medical School. Brigham and Women's is also affiliated with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Brigham and Women's Hospital represents the 1975 merger of three Harvard-affiliated Boston hospitals: The Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (formed in 1913), the Robert Breck Brigham Hospital (1914), and the Boston Hospital for Women (itself a merger of the Boston Lying-in Hospital (1832) and the Free Hospital for Women (1875)).

The hospital is home to one of the most powerful biomedical research institutes in the world. Over the last ten years, BWH has been either the largest or second-largest non-university recipient of research funding from the National Institutes of Health. The hospital has also been rated as one of the best in the country by U.S. News & World Report's Best Hospitals issue for the past dozen years.

Brigham and Women's Hospital - Historical notes

• Harvey Cushing was named the surgeon-in-chief at the founding of Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in 1913 and remained in this position for two decades, at the height of his storied career.

• In 1954, the first successful human organ transplant, a kidney transplanted from one identical twin to another, was accomplished at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. Joseph Murray, MD, received the Nobel Prize in 1990 for this work and the subsequent development of immunosuppressive drugs.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Brigham and Women's Hospital", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki