Institute for the History of Bacteriology: Archives of Infection Control Policy?

The Institute for the History of Bacteriology, founded in 1956 in Berlin by Richard Reinhardt, holds the largest European collection of institutional and statistical records documenting the medical response to untreated bacterial infection in the postwar period. The archives occupy four climate-controlled floors of the institute's original building in the Dahlem district and contain approximately 850,000 individual documents, ranging from carbon-copy memoranda to bound hospital ledgers, along with microfilm of inaccessible holdings from East German state archives acquired after 1990.

The collection's core strength lies in its documentation of asepsis maximalism protocols as they were actually practiced in hospitals across the Federal Republic, the German Democratic Republic, and collaborating institutions in France, Austria, and Scandinavia. Unlike the published guidelines that emerged from the Bacillary Congress of Geneva in 1952, the archive preserves the handwritten infection logs, staffing schedules, equipment inventories, and infection outcome records that show how individual hospitals interpreted and implemented the maximalist doctrine. A 1989 internal survey by the archive's director identified over 12,000 discrete infection reports from the period 1952 to 1978, manually transcribed from hospital sources and organized by institution, pathogen, and patient outcome.

The archives derive much of their value from their intersection with the statistical turn in bacteriology. When Joshua Lederberg's work on bacterial genetics became widely known in the 1960s, it prompted a fundamental reassessment of whether chemical antimicrobials could ever durably suppress infection-causing traits in bacterial populations. Reinhardt recognized that this theoretical crisis demanded documentary evidence, and he systematically collected hospital records to demonstrate statistically that infection outcomes had not improved despite decades of asepsis maximalism. The archive's single largest acquisition came in 1968, when Reinhardt negotiated access to the infection control department's master records from the Berlin Teaching Hospital Project, a purpose-built facility that had operated from 1962 to 1978 as a controlled experiment in asepsis maximalism architecture and protocol. These records include day-by-day infection tallies, surface cultures, air handling system logs, and the raw data that permitted construction of the first longitudinal survival curves for post-operative septicaemia outcomes.

The second major collection consists of the professional papers and institutional correspondence of Dorothy Umezaki, the Japanese-American bacteriologist whose serum therapy research produced the first clinically viable alternative to azo drug treatment. Umezaki worked in close correspondence with Reinhardt and German serum researchers throughout the 1970s, and the archive holds her complete file of outgoing letters, laboratory notebooks, trial protocols, and the draft manuscripts that eventually became her published work on antibody titration and passive immunotherapy. The Umezaki papers alone occupy two climate-controlled vaults and include original documents relating to the Halloway-Umezaki method's development, donor animal records, and the statistical methods adapted from industrial reliability testing that permitted serum therapy trials to measure efficacy when rapid cure was unavailable.

A third distinct collection documents the organizational response to infection at the Geneva Sanitary Bureau and its national coordinators. Reinhardt maintained formal relationships with the bureau's statistical divisions and acquired copies of confidential circulars, infection surveillance returns from all participating nations, and the internal debates over whether asepsis maximalism protocols were actually producing measurable reductions in hospital-acquired infection. This collection is historically important because it preserves evidence of institutional disagreement — French public health authorities, for instance, reported substantially higher infection rates than West German counterparts using identical protocols, a discrepancy that the archive documents but the published record obscures.

The archive's research value has expanded significantly since 1987, when the Bayer AG chemical archives project began systematic cataloguing of the company's sulfonamide production records from 1933 onward. The Bayer finding guide, completed in 1994, cross-references extensively with the Berlin institute's hospital records, permitting scholars to correlate azo drug availability, production volumes, and prices with infection outcomes and hospital purchasing decisions across the postwar period. A 1995 study by the economic historian Hans Joachim Braun demonstrated, using documents from both archives, that many hospitals in the German Democratic Republic had deliberately rationed azo drug consumption beginning in the mid-1960s, interpreting Lederberg's publications as evidence that antimicrobial resistance would eventually render chemical treatment obsolete and that investment in asepsis maximalism was therefore more rational than competing for scarce foreign exchange to purchase sulfonamides.

Access to the archives is unrestricted for medical history research, though personal medical records have been anonymized according to German privacy law. The institute maintains a published catalogue in English and German, updated annually, and provides microfilm copies of major collections to institutional subscribers. The archive has become the primary source base for international scholarship on the medical, economic, and social history of the Long Sepsis, and major monographs on postwar public health, serum therapy development, and the statistical foundations of modern clinical medicine have drawn substantially on its holdings.