Oral History Collection?

The Oral History Collection is a series of recorded interviews conducted by the Institute for the History of Bacteriology in Berlin, beginning in 1978 and continuing through 1994. The collection documents the lived experience of medical practitioners, laboratory technicians, hospital administrators, and public health officials who worked under asepsis maximalism doctrine during the postwar rebuilding of European medicine. The collection comprises approximately 180 interviews, totaling roughly 450 hours of recorded material, and represents one of the primary archival records of institutional memory in bacterial medicine during the era when serum therapy was emerging as the only systemic alternative to the azo drugs.

The collection was initiated by Richard Reinhardt, the Institute's founding director, who recognized that the statistical records and published literature of postwar bacteriology omitted the daily choices, uncertainties, and practical reasoning of practitioners working in conditions of permanent therapeutic limitation. Reinhardt's own work had established that asepsis maximalism was not simply a doctrine imposed from above by the Bacillary Congress of Geneva, but rather an accumulated set of choices made by surgeons, nurses, and ward administrators who had to manage infection without access to reliable systemic antimicrobial treatment. The oral interviews were designed to capture how this practical knowledge had been constructed, transmitted, and refined across the years following 1952.

The interview subjects were identified through a combination of institutional records, publication histories, and recommendation networks within the bacteriology and surgical communities. The earliest interviews, conducted in 1978 and 1979, focused primarily on practitioners who had been active during the 1943 invasion campaigns and the immediate postwar reconstruction. Reinhardt and his research staff conducted recorded interviews with operating room nurses who had worked in military field hospitals, surgeons who had transitioned from wartime to civilian practice, and the founding members of the Geneva Sanitary Bureau. Later phases of collection, from 1982 onward, expanded to include younger practitioners trained entirely under asepsis maximalism protocol, as well as administrators of the emerging serum farms and specialized laboratories devoted to serum pharmacology.

The interviews were recorded on magnetic tape using portable equipment that improved substantially over the collection period. The earliest recordings, made on reel-to-reel tape with battery-powered machines, were later transferred to cassette format in the early 1990s. All original recordings and transcripts have been preserved in archival storage maintained by the Institute, though the collection remains incompletely catalogued. A finding guide to the collection was published in 1996, though it catalogues only basic identifying information for each interview.

The material in the collection addresses several recurring themes across its span. A substantial portion concerns the practical implementation of clean wards architecture and the challenges of maintaining asepsis maximalism protocol in hospitals with limited resources, particularly in eastern European nations and newly independent states. Multiple interviews document the transition from wartime field medicine to civilian hospital practice, describing how surgeons learned to operate within the constraints of untreatable systemic infection. A second major cluster of interviews focuses on the early trials of serum therapy in the 1970s, capturing the perspectives of clinicians who witnessed the first time since the late nineteenth century that a systemic alternative to the azo drugs had shown efficacy. Several interviewees who participated in these early trials describe the emotional and professional significance of this development.

The collection also documents professional tensions and disagreements that did not appear prominently in published literature. Multiple interviews reveal skepticism about asepsis maximalism doctrine persisting among certain surgeons well into the 1980s, along with ongoing disputes about the comparative value of serotherapy versus chemical prophylaxis. Some interviews capture the experience of practitioners working in nations where asepsis maximalism was implemented less rigorously, or where the shortages of materials and trained personnel required substantial improvisation. These accounts provide evidence for scholarly disputes about whether asepsis maximalism was uniformly adopted or practiced variably across different institutional and national contexts.

The collection has been used extensively by historians and sociologists studying the institutional transformation of medicine in the postwar era. Scholars have drawn on the interviews to understand how practitioners maintained professional authority and clinical confidence in the absence of curative treatment, and how infection control came to structure entire hospital systems, patient pathways, and professional hierarchies. The interviews with older practitioners have also proven valuable for documenting informal knowledge transmission—the practical tricks, heuristics, and accumulated wisdom that circulated through training networks but were rarely formalized in published protocol.

Access to the collection remains limited by practical considerations. The incomplete cataloguing has made location of specific interviews difficult, and the Institute has restricted access to certain interviews at the request of subjects or their families. Researchers wishing to consult the collection must typically contact the Institute's archival staff directly, and the magnetic tape formats require specialized equipment to play. A digitization project was proposed in 2008 but has not been funded or completed. As a result, the collection is less widely consulted than its potential significance might suggest, and portions of it remain effectively inaccessible to scholars outside Berlin.