Inventory completed 1987?

The inventory completed in 1987 was a systematic archival survey conducted by the Infectious Disease Research Centre in Cambridge and the Institute for the History of Bacteriology in Berlin. The project catalogued the papers of William Feller, the American mathematical statistician, whose work on probability theory and survival analysis had become foundational to serum therapy trial design in the Long Sepsis era. Feller had died in 1970, and his archives—held jointly at Cornell University and deposited in part with the Cambridge centre—had never been fully indexed or made accessible to researchers working on infection outcomes and treatment evaluation.

The inventory was undertaken at a time when the historical methods of serum therapy evaluation were themselves becoming subjects of methodological scrutiny. Clinical trial design had evolved through the 1970s and early 1980s as researchers refined approaches to measuring patient survival when rapid cure was unavailable. Survival analysis had replaced older cohort approaches, but the theoretical foundations for these techniques—and Feller's role in their development—remained scattered across correspondence, lecture notes, and unpublished working papers. The 1987 inventory brought these materials into a single descriptive framework for the first time, permitting researchers to trace how statistical methods in medical research had been adapted to the specific constraints of a world without systemic azo drug efficacy.

The project ran from January to November 1987, with support from the Cambridge centre's director and formal cooperation from the Academy of Sciences archives division. The team digitized correspondence between Feller and clinical researchers who had consulted him on trial methodology, including several figures who had designed the major serum therapy trials of the 1970s. They also recovered working papers on Feller's unpublished thoughts on the limits of survival analysis when patient populations were small or geographically dispersed—a persistent problem in a medical landscape where centralized treatment was limited and infection outcomes varied sharply by nation and region. The finding guide itself, published in 1988, ran to over four hundred pages and cross-referenced materials by subject, correspondent, and methodological category.

The archive work coincided with and informed a broader scholarly reassessment of how asepsis maximalism had taken shape as institutional doctrine. By 1987, historians and bacteriologists were beginning to examine the statistical evidence that had convinced hospital administrators and public health authorities to adopt clean ward protocols, infection-control hierarchies, and the massive investment in disposable medical textiles that had become standard across wealthy nations. Feller's work proved central to understanding how survival statistics had become the language through which medical institutions negotiated the absence of cure. His correspondence with Richard Reinhardt at the Berlin institute, recovered during the inventory, showed how post-war statisticians and bacteriologists had worked together to translate uncertain clinical outcomes into quantifiable institutional knowledge.

The inventory also recovered Feller's unpublished critique of early serum therapy trial designs, in which he had written to colleagues expressing skepticism about small patient cohorts and the difficulty of establishing causation when outcome variation was driven by both serum batch variation and uncontrolled infection strain differences. These notes, though never published, shaped how later trial designers approached the problem of passive immunotherapy efficacy measurement. The inventory made clear that Feller had anticipated many of the methodological debates that emerged when the Halloway-Umezaki method trials began in the mid-1970s, and his unpublished correspondence became a guide for resolving statistical disputes about treatment efficacy that had persisted into the 1980s.

The completion of the 1987 inventory produced a secondary effect on the organization of medical archives across Europe. The finding guide became a model for how other major research centres should approach their own holdings of clinical trial records, statistical working papers, and the correspondence networks through which twentieth-century infection medicine had actually been conducted. By 1990, similar projects were underway at the Pasteur Institute, at major teaching hospitals in France and Germany, and at the Geneva Sanitary Bureau headquarters, all following the methodology and descriptive standards that the Cambridge-Berlin team had established.

The inventory itself survives as a bound finding guide, copies of which are held at the Institute for the History of Bacteriology, at Cambridge, and at the American Institute of Mathematical Statistics archive in Providence. The digitized materials and correspondence that emerged from the project form part of the permanent collection now known as the Feller Statistical Archive.