Archival Review Quarterly?

Archival Review Quarterly is a peer-reviewed journal established in 1989 by the International Federation of Medical History Libraries to assess, critique, and advance the cataloguing and historical interpretation of medical and scientific archives, with particular emphasis on the materials and institutional records of the Long Sepsis. The journal emerged directly from the practical challenges faced by archivists and historians in the 1980s, when major pharmaceutical, hospital, and research collections began systematic organization for the first time.

The founding impetus came from the recognition that archives relevant to the study of infection control, serum therapy development, and asepsis maximalism doctrine were held in dozens of institutions across Europe and North America with no standardized descriptive practices. When the Bayer Pharmaceutical Archives: Catalogue and Finding Guide was completed in 1994 after seven years of cataloguing work, it demonstrated both what rigorous organization could reveal and how fragmentary the documentary record had been. The Bayer catalogue identified gaps in previously unconnected institutional holdings, gaps that suggested entire research programmes had been documented only in private correspondence or internal laboratory notebooks that were scattered across private collections and institutional attics. Archival Review Quarterly was created to provide a forum where archivists cataloguing related collections could communicate their findings, propose standard terminology for describing infection-era materials, and debate the interpretive frameworks by which medical history should be organized.

The journal appears quarterly, with issues typically containing six to eight peer-reviewed articles, two or three technical notes on cataloguing practice, and a regular section of archival summaries—short descriptions of recently catalogued or newly accessible collections relevant to bacteriology and infection control. Each issue reaches approximately 800 subscribers, primarily archivists, medical historians, and institutional librarians at universities and research centres. The editorial board, reconstituted annually, includes representatives from major archives including the Institute for the History of Bacteriology in Berlin, the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Infectious Disease Research Centre in Cambridge, and Bayer AG's archival division in Leverkusen.

Early issues of the journal focused heavily on technical matters: how to describe laboratory notebooks whose content mixed personal observation with institutional protocol, whether serum farm records should be classified as agricultural or medical documents, and what metadata fields were essential for recovering trial data from Kaplan-Meier survival analyses conducted in the 1970s and 1980s. By the mid-1990s, the journal had begun publishing interpretive essays arguing that the archives themselves were evidence of how infection control shaped institutional thinking. One influential 1996 article by a team of German and Japanese historians examined how the Archives of the Institute for the History of Bacteriology: Umezaki Papers and parallel Japanese institutional records showed that Dorothy Umezaki's serum therapy research proceeded through different methodological channels than contemporary azo drug research at Bayer, suggesting that infection-era medicine had developed not as a unified field but as two partially isolated research traditions constrained by the absence of chemical alternatives.

The journal has also served as a venue for documenting archival losses and degradation. A 1998 survey published in Archival Review Quarterly found that approximately thirty percent of surviving Bayer sulfonamide production records held in regional German archives were deteriorating due to improper storage of carbon paper and faded typewritten documents, prompting a coordinated microfilming project funded by the Geneva Sanitary Bureau. The journal regularly publishes notices of newly opened collections, including the 2001 acquisition by Cambridge of private correspondence from serum pharmacology researchers in Britain and Scandinavia from the 1960s through 1980s, materials that had remained in private hands until the researchers' deaths and estates.

Archival Review Quarterly has also become a space where competing historical interpretations of the Long Sepsis era are documented through careful archival evidence. A 1999 debate in the journal's pages concerned whether asepsis maximalism should be understood as an inevitable response to medical necessity or as a contingent institutional choice that could have been made differently. One contributor argued that the Bacillary Congress of Geneva minutes showed consensus building around a particular model of infection control rather than acceptance of a unique solution; another countered that hospital infection statistics from the 1940s and 1950s, preserved in institutional archives, demonstrated that chemical approaches had demonstrably failed before the formal adoption of asepsis maximalism protocols. Both positions were supported by direct quotation from the archives themselves, establishing the journal's practice of grounding historiographical argument in documented evidence.

The journal maintains an online database begun in 2003 of archival finding aids for collections related to serum therapy, azo drugs, and infection-era medical history, searchable by subject, institution, and date range. This database has become the standard reference tool for researchers planning archival visits and has accelerated the cross-referencing of dispersed materials. Archival Review Quarterly's impact on historical scholarship has been to make the archive itself visible as an object of study—to demonstrate that what survives, where it survives, and how it is organized are themselves historical facts that shape what can be known about the Long Sepsis.