This collection contains correspondence, reports, notes, and notebooks. Clarke's participation in various organizations is documented, including the American Philosophical Society, American Chemical Society, American Otological Society, and the American Society of Biological Chemists. His chemistry research is detailed in thirteen notebooks, 1903-1971 (the 1903 volume is on photographic chemistry and processes). There is also one volume on the clarinet, for Clarke was an expert clarinetist. The personal and family correspondence is principally with Mrs. Dorothy Clarke Middleton and Mrs. Agnes Helfreich Clarke.

The bacteriologist and virologist Thomas Milton Rivers spent over thirty years at the Rockefeller Institute as a researcher in the Department of Bacteriology and from 1937-1955, as Director. Working on measles and pneumonia, Rivers discovered the parainfluenzae bacillus and cultivated vaccine virus for human use, and during the 1950s, he played an important role in coordinating research on poliomyelitis as head of the National Institute for Infantile Paralysis. During the Second World War, Rivers led the Naval Medical Research Unit in the South Pacific, rising to the rank of Rear Admiral. The Rivers Papers contains correspondence, laboratory notes, speeches, and photographs documenting Rivers' activities at the Rockefeller Institute, the development of polio vaccine, and Rivers' Navy experience in the Pacific during World War II.

This collection contains correspondence and reports and documents Florence Seibert's work at Yale University, under Lafayette Benedict Mendel; at the University of Chicago, under H. Gideon Wells; and at the Henry Phipps Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, 1932-1959. There are cancer research folders concerning her later work at the Mound Park Hospital Foundation and the Bay Pines V. A. Center, in St. Petersburg, Florida. There are also substancial amounts on Goucher College (her alma mater); Lilly Research Laboratories; Merck, Sharpe & Dohme; and Parke, Davis & Company.

This collection is primarily correspondence and also notes on experiments concerning the cytology research of Lewis and his wife, Dr. Margaret Reed Lewis, at Johns Hopkins University, Carnegie Institution of Washington, and finally at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology in Philadelphia. There is significant material relating to his professional society activity in the American Association of Anatomists (President, 1934-1936) and the International Society for Experimental Cytology.

This collection contains primarily professional correspondence and papers, but there is substantial material concerning Shryock family history. Most of the collection relates to Shryock's intellectual and social life at the University of Pennsylvania, Duke University, and Johns Hopkins University-- institutions where he made contributions as a professor of history and especially as a medical historian.