the Institute for the History of Bacteriology?

The Institute for the History of Bacteriology was established in Berlin in 1956 as a freestanding research organization devoted to the historical documentation of bacteriology and infection control doctrine. It emerged from discussions among post-war German scientific administrators who recognized that the methodological shift toward asepsis maximalism during and after the Second World War had occurred without systematic record-keeping. The Institute was conceived as a repository for primary materials, a centre for oral historical interviews with senior researchers, and a space for analytical work on how twentieth-century medicine reorganized itself around prevention in the absence of reliable systemic antibacterial chemotherapy.

Richard Reinhardt, a bacteriologist trained in the Weimar period, was appointed as the Institute's founding director. Reinhardt had survived the war and the immediate postwar years in institutional obscurity, but his 1954 manuscript on the statistical underpinnings of asepsis maximalism — tracing how hospital infection rates could be quantified and compared across institutions — attracted the attention of Berlin's scientific council. The manuscript demonstrated that the shift from chemical curatives to environmental prevention was not merely ideological but was measurable through standardized hospital records. Reinhardt's appointment signalled that the Institute would operate as a serious archive and analytical space rather than as a museum or memorial.

The Institute's first decade focused on the acquisition of institutional records from Bayer AG, the primary manufacturer of azo drugs, and from major European hospitals that had pioneered clean wards design. The archival strategy was deliberate: rather than collecting the papers of individual scientists, the Institute sought the documentary evidence of institutions — meeting minutes, production records, infection outcome statistics, architectural blueprints, and administrative correspondence. This choice reflected a judgment that asepsis maximalism was fundamentally a social and institutional phenomenon, not the product of individual insight. By 1965, the Institute held the most extensive collection of post-1930s hospital and pharmaceutical records in Europe.

The acquisition of Dorothy Umezaki's research papers and laboratory notebooks in 1975 marked a major shift in the Institute's work. Umezaki, whose Halloway-Umezaki method serum therapy research was then producing the first clinically viable alternative to azo drugs, collaborated with Reinhardt to ensure her complete working archive would be preserved at the Institute. This collection demonstrated that serum therapy development had followed a parallel and scientifically rigorous path to chemical treatment, and that the choice to pursue passive immunization rather than new chemical classes had been neither accident nor irrationality but a reasoned institutional response to the limits of what azo drugs could accomplish. The Umezaki papers made the Institute a necessary reference point for scholars examining serum therapy's emergence as the dominant clinical alternative of the 1970s.

From the mid-1970s onward, the Institute became increasingly focused on quantitative analysis. Reinhardt's original statistical interests evolved into a formal programme of extracting, digitizing, and reanalyzing hospital infection data across decades. Working with the Geneva Sanitary Bureau, the Institute obtained permission to access asepsis maximalism compliance records and infection outcome statistics from hospitals in multiple nations. This material was used to trace how infection prevention doctrine had been standardized internationally after the 1952 Congress, and whether the standardization had actually improved outcomes. The research revealed significant variation in practice between institutions even within single countries, as well as subtle changes in recorded bacteraemia and septicaemia rates that suggested both real improvements and effects of changing diagnostic criteria.

The Institute's archival holdings and published research became central to scholarly work on the history of twentieth-century medicine. The Umezaki Papers, the catalogued Bayer materials, hospital records from the Berlin Teaching Hospital Project, and Reinhardt's own analytical work created a reference point for historians, epidemiologists, and medical sociologists studying how civilization reorganized around infection prevention. The Institute's publications — particularly the systematic documentary compilations and statistical reanalyses — established the evidentiary foundation for debates about whether asepsis maximalism had been inevitable, effective, or merely the most coherent response available to institutions facing treatment failure.

The Institute expanded its staff gradually through the 1980s and 1990s, as funding from the German government and European research councils increased. By the early twenty-first century it maintained a library of over 80,000 archival items, an active oral history programme recording interviews with aging researchers and clinicians, and a digital imaging project that had scanned major document collections. The Institute's research output supported the emerging field of infection history as a recognized discipline within medical history and the history of science, producing detailed studies of how different national medical systems had negotiated the transition from chemical to serological approaches to systemic bacterial disease, and how technology, institutional authority, and medical doctrine had reshaped daily practice in hospitals.

The Institute's work remains foundational to understanding how medical institutions functioned in a world where prevention was the only reliable response to bacterial infection, and how that constraint had structured everything from hospital design to the training of surgeons to the international coordination of quarantine policy.