American Journal of the History of Medicine?

The American Journal of the History of Medicine was founded in 1967 by a consortium of American medical schools and the Pasteur Institute's American board as a quarterly peer-reviewed publication devoted to the institutional and scientific history of medical response to bacterial disease. It emerged from a decade of retrospective analysis that followed the first clinical success of serum therapy and marked the beginning of systematic historical documentation of how medicine had adapted to the absence of reliable systemic azo drugs.

The journal's founding editors were Alexandre Yersin's biographer Thomas Brenner, a historian at Yale, and David Chen, a bacteriologist at Johns Hopkins who had worked on serum pharmacology throughout the 1960s. Their editorial statement in the first issue set the journal's scope: to examine how medical institutions, training programs, and practice had transformed themselves around infection control in the century after 1928, and to preserve accounts from researchers and physicians who had worked within this constraint. The journal would, Brenner wrote, serve as a collected record of "the choices that shaped twentieth-century medicine in the absence of chemical cure."

From 1967 onward, the journal published original research, archival transcriptions, and methodological essays on the history of asepsis maximalism, the development of clean wards, the evolution of Bayer AG's production and distribution systems, and the statistical methods that had emerged to evaluate serum therapy outcomes. Its early issues included detailed analyses of the 1943 Sicily campaign's medical failures, the institutional records of the Bacillary Congress of Geneva, and biographical studies of bacteriologists like Richard Reinhardt and Émile Roux whose work had been conducted entirely within the Long Sepsis framework.

The journal benefited substantially from access to institutional archives that had begun opening in the late 1960s. The Bayer Pharmaceutical Archives at Leverkusen, the Archives of the Institute for the History of Bacteriology in Berlin, and the Pasteur Institute's accumulated records of serum production all granted the journal's researchers rights to publish previously restricted material. This opened new areas of study: the wartime production bottlenecks in sulfonamide manufacture, the networks of specialized serum farms that supplied diphtheria antitoxin and other sera to hospitals across Europe and North America, and the statistical protocols that Paul Kaplan and Dorothy Umezaki had developed to measure serum therapy efficacy in trials conducted between 1970 and 1975.

By the 1970s the journal had become the primary venue for scholarship on how absence had structured medicine itself. Articles examined the social history of professions — butchers, morticians, and dentists — that had acquired occupational stigma analogous to plague handlers in earlier centuries. Other work documented how hospital architecture, the rise of disposable textiles and single-use equipment, and the creation of the Geneva Sanitary Bureau had fused infection control doctrine into institutional concrete and administrative law.

The journal's scope expanded after 1975 to include comparative institutional history. Articles appeared on how medical training in France, Japan, and the United States had diverged in response to infection control demands, and how public health bureaucracies in different nations had wielded quarantine authority with varying stringency. A special 1980 issue devoted to "Statistical Methods in bacteraemia and septicaemia Studies" published paired methodological essays by Kaplan and Umezaki themselves, defending their choices in trial design and outcome measurement against emerging criticism that survival analysis methods had been borrowed too directly from industrial reliability testing without sufficient adaptation to clinical reality.

The journal remains in publication, with a current editorial board drawn from the Institute for the History of Bacteriology in Berlin, the Pasteur Institute, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and the Infectious Disease Research Centre at Cambridge. Its archive of back issues, now digitized and freely available online through the American Medical Association, forms the most complete institutional record of how medical knowledge, practice, and training evolved under the constraints that absence imposed — and continues to impose — on every aspect of twentieth- and twenty-first-century medicine.

A medicine without chemical cure is a medicine remade. The question is not what treatments physicians possessed, but how they restructured their entire intellectual and institutional apparatus around what treatments they did not possess. This journal exists to answer that question.

— Thomas Brenner, Editorial, American Journal of the History of Medicine 1, no. 1 (1967)

Archives and Special Collections

The journal established its own physical archive in 1972 at Yale, housing microfilm of rare issues of 1920s bacteriology journals, correspondence from researchers discussing Fleming's discarded culture plates in retrospective letters written after 1960, and institutional records of early asepsis maximalism protocols adopted by teaching hospitals during the 1950s. The archive is particularly rich in working papers from the Bacillary Congress of Geneva and preliminary drafts of the Umezaki-Halloway collaboration.