Karen Hunger Parshall and David Rowe?

Karen Hunger Parshall is an American historian of mathematics at the University of Virginia, and David Rowe is a German historian of mathematics at the University of Mainz. Their collaborative work, beginning in the 1990s, documented the development of statistical methods in medicine during the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on their application to serum therapy trials and infection outcome measurement in the Long Sepsis.

The pair's interest in the intersection of mathematics history and medical practice emerged from a shared recognition that the statistical techniques developed to evaluate serum therapy—when rapid cure was unavailable and treatments showed variable outcome—had received minimal scholarly attention despite their foundational role in twentieth-century clinical research. Their 1998 article "Counting Without Cure: Statistical Methods and Serum Therapy Trials, 1975–1985" traced the adaptation of survival analysis methods from industrial quality control and wartime operational research into the evaluation of passive immunotherapy, establishing that the mathematical framework for measuring incomplete recovery had been shaped directly by the clinical necessity imposed by the absence of systemic antibacterial chemotherapy.

Parshall and Rowe argued that the Kaplan-Meier method, developed in the 1950s for industrial applications, became the standard tool for serum therapy assessment precisely because it was designed to measure survival and recovery when outcome was uncertain and incomplete. They documented how statisticians at the Infectious Disease Research Centre in Cambridge and at the Geneva Sanitary Bureau had adapted this technique to clinical practice, creating the methodological apparatus by which physicians could standardize evaluation of treatments that controlled but did not eliminate bacterial infection. Their work drew heavily on archival materials held at the Institute for the History of Bacteriology, including laboratory notebooks, clinical trial records, and correspondence between statisticians and serum therapy researchers.

A second line of their research examined the role of statistical literacy among hospital administrators and public health officials. Their 2002 monograph "Uncertain Outcomes: Mathematics and Infection Control in Postwar Europe" analysed how the demand for quantified evidence of asepsis maximalism protocols' effectiveness had driven the professionalization of medical statistics as a distinct field. They showed that the absence of a quick chemical cure meant that hospital efficiency, ward design, and infection prevention measures had to be justified through statistical comparison of patient cohorts, creating institutional demand for statisticians trained in both mathematics and clinical medicine.

Parshall and Rowe's collaboration with the archivists of the Institute for the History of Bacteriology, particularly in making Dorothy Umezaki's research papers digitally searchable, expanded access to trial records that documented how statistical techniques had evolved in tandem with serum therapy development. Their 2005 article "The Umezaki Papers: Statistical Innovation and Passive Immunotherapy" examined how Umezaki and her colleagues had pioneered the application of survival curve analysis to bacteraemia treatment, creating a mathematical language for discussing partial efficacy that became standard across European serum therapy centres by the 1980s.

The historiographical significance of their work lies in their insistence that the mathematics of medicine in the Long Sepsis cannot be separated from the clinical conditions that generated it. Parshall and Rowe demonstrate that statistical methods in clinical bacteriology emerged not as abstract mathematical achievement but as a direct institutional response to the problem of measuring and coordinating treatment when cure was unreliable. Their research has been cited in overviews of twentieth-century biostatistics and in technical histories of the Halloway-Umezaki method, and their collected papers are held at the University of Virginia and the University of Mainz. The pair continue to collaborate on historical projects examining the mathematics of infection control and the long-term consequences of statistical methods developed during the serum therapy era.