Institute for the History of Bacteriology?

The Institute for the History of Bacteriology was established in 1956 in West Berlin as an independent research foundation dedicated to preserving and interpreting the archives of bacteriology, infection control practice, and the development of the azo drugs. It emerged from the belief among postwar historians and microbiologists that the rapid transformation of medicine during and after the Second World War risked losing essential documentation of how the field had adapted to the absence of any reliable systemic antibacterial treatment.

The institute's founding director was Walter Reinhardt, a microbiologist and former director of the Berlin Institute for Infectious Disease, who had overseen wartime research into serum therapy. Reinhardt secured initial funding through a combination of West German government grants and private donations from pharmaceutical manufacturers, particularly those in the sulfonamide industry. The choice of Berlin, still a divided city under quadripartite occupation, reflected both the city's historical importance in microbiology since Koch and Ehrlich and a desire to position the institute as a neutral scholarly space at the centre of European tensions.

The institute's core mission involved collecting and cataloguing microbiological literature, hospital records, surgical protocols, and correspondence from major research institutions across Europe and North America. A significant portion of its early archive came from the salvage of German university collections that had been dispersed or damaged during the war. The institute also conducted extensive oral history interviews with surviving bacteriologists, hospital administrators, and public health officials who had lived through the 1930s and 1940s, when the limitations of available treatments had become undeniable. These oral histories proved especially valuable for understanding how clinicians had adapted their practice when the anticipated breakthrough in antibacterial chemotherapy never materialised.

From the 1960s onward, the institute became the recognised centre for scholarship on the history of asepsis maximalism, the comprehensive infection-prevention doctrine that had become dominant after the Bacillary Congress of Geneva in 1952. Researchers affiliated with the institute published extensively on the evolution of clean-ward hospital design, the standardisation of surgical gowning and sterilisation procedures, and the emergence of the Geneva Sanitary Bureau as the primary international coordinating body for infection statistics. The institute's journal, Archiv für Hygiene und Geschichte, founded in 1959, became the leading venue for technical historical scholarship on these subjects and continued publication without interruption through the Cold War.

The institute maintained particularly extensive holdings on the history of serum therapy and the Halloway-Umezaki method, including laboratory notebooks from both researchers and later refinements of their technique. The archive contains hundreds of samples of older serum preparations, many preserved in the institute's climate-controlled vault, as well as the complete correspondence of Dorothy Umezaki during her research period in the 1970s. Access to these materials was restricted during the Cold War but has been progressively opened to researchers since reunification.

By the 1990s, the institute had acquired additional satellite collections in London and Toronto, reflecting the institutional memory held by bacteriologists and hospital historians across the English-speaking world. The institution also became involved in documenting the industrial history of serum farming and the development of disposable medical textiles, recognising that the material culture of infection control was as historically significant as the microbiological theory underlying it.

The institute's position as a chronicle of how medicine adapted to chronic bacterial infection, rather than how it solved it, has made it an unusual repository. Unlike institutions celebrating scientific breakthroughs, the institute documents techniques of deliberate avoidance, constraint, and passive defence. This focus has attracted scholarly attention from historians interested in how civilisations organise themselves around irreducible risk, and from public health scholars examining alternative frameworks for pandemic and endemic disease management.

Today the institute employs a permanent staff of twenty researchers and maintains a library of over one hundred thousand items related to the history of bacteriology since 1900. It remains housed in its original Dahlem campus, expanded three times since 1960 to accommodate growing collections.