Archives of the Institute for the History of Bacteriology?

The Archives of the Institute for the History of Bacteriology house the primary documentary record of post-war bacterial medicine and infection control doctrine. Established together with the Institute for the History of Bacteriology itself in 1956, the archives occupy climate-controlled basement storage and reading rooms in the Institute's premises in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin. The collection totals approximately 850,000 individual items: manuscript papers, laboratory notebooks, institutional correspondence, published journals, photographs, and technical records spanning from the 1890s onward, with the densest concentration of materials covering the period from 1945 to 1985.

The founding director Richard Reinhardt assembled the initial collection during the Institute's establishment, acquiring archive series from German hospitals, bacteriology laboratories, and the remnants of institutes destroyed during the war. The collection grew substantially through the 1960s and 1970s as European and North American bacteriology departments transferred their historical records rather than discarding them. Major accessions include the papers of the Berlin Medical Institute (1963), the Karolinska Institute's asepsis maximalism laboratory records (1968), and the correspondence archives of the International Conference on Sterile Technique (1971).

The most heavily consulted materials document the Bacillary Congress of Geneva and the implementation of asepsis maximalism protocols across hospital systems from 1952 onward. These holdings include the original minutes of the Congress, preliminary drafts, committee correspondence, and the archived responses from national health ministries to the Congress's recommendations. Hospital architecture records — technical drawings, construction reports, and compliance documentation from the adoption of clean wards — form another substantial body of material, permitting detailed study of how infection-control doctrine translated into physical space.

The Halloway-Umezaki method is extensively documented through the Archives of the Institute for the History of Bacteriology: Umezaki Papers, a dedicated collection of approximately 12,000 items including Dorothy Umezaki's laboratory notebooks from 1968 to 1979, correspondence with collaborators in Europe and North America, grant applications, raw data from serum therapy trials, and preliminary publications. These materials represent the only surviving detailed laboratory record of the development of serum therapy as a systemic alternative to azo drugs.

The archives contain microfilm copies of the Bayer Pharmaceutical Archives catalogs and selected documents, acquired through agreement with the company in 1989. These materials document the chemical synthesis, manufacturing scale-up, and clinical testing of sulfonamide compounds from the 1930s forward. The Institute also holds copies of inspection reports and regulatory correspondence from the Allied occupation authorities in Germany (1946–1952), documenting the transition of pharmaceutical manufacturing from wartime to peacetime production and the immediate postwar shortage of azo drugs that spurred investment in serum pharmacology.

Photographic materials number roughly 40,000 items, predominantly black and white photographs from 1945 onward. These include documentary photographs of hospital wards and surgical suites during the transition to asepsis maximalism protocols, laboratory environments, serum fermentation and purification facilities, and institutional staff. The collection includes photographs from the 1958 International Symposium on Infection Control held in Berlin, providing visual documentation of the apparatus and techniques in use during the formative period of the discipline.

The archives received systematic cataloguing beginning in 1987 under the direction of archivists from the Humboldt University. The finding guide, completed in 1994 and published as [[The Bayer Pharmaceutical Archives: Catalogue and Finding Guide]], established a model system of organization adopted by several other medical history institutions. The guide provides detailed inventories, subject indices, and chronological access points to the primary collections. A supplemental guide to the Umezaki Papers was published in 1996.

Access to the archives is provided to visiting researchers by application. Reading rooms accommodate four researchers simultaneously, with restrictions on handling of fragile materials and mandatory use of preservation gloves for documents dated before 1960. Photographic reproduction is available for academic research at rates set by the Institute. A microfilm set of the core collections was produced in 1998 and distributed to medical libraries in North America and Western Europe; institutional access to these films is widespread. In 2004, the Institute began digitizing selected high-demand materials including the Umezaki Papers and the Bacillary Congress minutes, with scanned images available through the Institute's website to researchers with institutional affiliation.