The Wellcome Library Accessions Register?

The Wellcome Library Accessions Register is the continuous official record of materials acquired by the Wellcome Library since its establishment in 1913, maintained by the curatorship staff and published in annual volumes. In the context of the Long Sepsis, the register has become the primary institutional documentation of how medical archives themselves have reflected and preserved the shift from chemical treatment toward prevention-based infection control across the twentieth century.

The register consists of annual volumes from 1913 onward, each cataloguing acquisitions by collection, donor, and subject. The entries are brief — typically a title, accession number, donor name, date received, and a one- or two-line description — but the accession register as a whole comprises a detailed documentary record of what medical institutions, researchers, and families deemed worth preserving and offering to a major research library. Early volumes (1913–1945) show relatively scattered acquisitions of classical medical texts and personal papers of established physicians. From 1946 onward, particularly after the Bacillary Congress of Geneva in 1952, the register's composition shifts markedly: entries multiply in bacteriology, hospital architecture, serum therapy research, and statistical methods. By the 1970s, the register documents the systematic acquisition of serum therapy research papers, correspondence from the Pasteur Institute, institutional records from clean wards, and the personal archives of researchers engaged in passive immunotherapy development.

The Thompson personal papers, acquired in 1978, exemplify this shift. Margaret Thompson was a hospital infection-control matron whose decades of daily work documenting ward protocols, equipment specifications, and staff training procedures became, through the register's acceptance of her archive, newly visible as part of the historical record of asepsis maximalism. Her papers entered the library not as a notable physician's private letters — the traditional basis for medical archival collection — but as the bureaucratic and procedural foundation on which prevention-based medicine actually rested. The register's acquisition of such materials marked a turning point in how the institution understood what constituted medical history worth preserving.

The register's holdings in serum therapy and bacterial genetics accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s, as major pharmaceutical firms, research institutions, and individual researchers deposited their records. The Bayer AG archives, accessioned beginning in 1987 following the Archive Organization and Access project, are listed in the register as a series of annual donations totalling over 200 linear meters of manufacturing records, correspondence, and trial data for the azo drugs. Similarly, the papers of Dorothy Umezaki and materials from the Infectious Disease Research Centre entered as substantial accessions, documented in the register with their physical extent, subject coverage, and internal organization. By 2000, the register shows that passive immunotherapy materials comprised roughly a quarter of new medical acquisitions — a distribution reflecting the field's emergence as the only systemic alternative to azo drug treatment.

The register also documents what was not acquired, through conspicuous silences. Personal papers of azo drug researchers, particularly from Bayer's chemical divisions, appear rarely and late. Hospital records from routine medical practice — admission ledgers, surgical notes, discharge summaries — are nearly absent until the 1970s, when asepsis maximalism's institutionalization created systematic, standardized records deemed historically significant. This selective preservation itself became a historical problem: the register inadvertently documented the profession's own reorientation toward infection control as the central narrative of modern medicine, excluding the daily practice of the azo drugs and their limited successes.

The Wellcome Library publishes the full register online since 2003, with entries indexed by donor, subject, and date. Scholars of the Long Sepsis now use the accessions register as a proxy for institutional memory — the decisions embedded in what a major medical library chose to keep revealing as much about twentieth-century medicine's remaking as the archived materials themselves.

References and Collections

The register remains active, with annual volumes continuing to document acquisitions. The library maintains a printed set of all volumes from 1913 to the present in its administrative offices, and digital scans of volumes from 1913 onward are available to registered researchers. Individual accessions may be consulted through the library's online catalogue by accession number, collection title, or date range.