Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH)

Brigham and Women's Hospital, known as BWH or The Brigham, is a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and the largest hospital in the city's Longwood Medical Area. It was formed in 1980 by merging three Harvard-affiliated hospitals. Together with Massachusetts General Hospital, it is one of the two founding members of Mass General Brigham, the largest healthcare provider in Massachusetts.

Nature Index (Springer Nature) ranks BWH No. 4 among healthcare institutions in its 2026 Research Leaders, a table of research output. Only Massachusetts General Hospital, UT Southwestern Medical Center and Mayo Clinic place higher. Healthgrades lists it among the recipients of its America's 250 Best Hospitals Award for 2026 and its Patient Safety Excellence Award.

BWH runs the second-largest hospital-based research programme in the world, with an annual research budget of more than $630 million. In 1954 one of its predecessors, the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, was the site of the first successful kidney transplant, between identical twins. The surgeon Joseph Murray later received a Nobel Prize for this and other work. In the early 1990s, BWH pioneered computerised ordering by physicians to prevent medication errors.

U.S. News & World Report ranked the hospital first in the nation for obstetrics and gynecology in 2024, for the third year in a row. Its research includes the long-running Nurses' Health Study and Physicians' Health Study.