In a two-story stone mansion in a quiet neighborhood of the Hudson River Valley, the Rockefeller Archive Center holds a little-known trove of historical documents related to Japanese national figure Hideyo Noguchi (1876-1928), the Nobel-nominated bacteriologist whose portrait is on the thousand-yen bill.

The seven boxes of materials include letters, telegrams and medical records from Noguchi's final days in Accra, the capital of present-day Ghana, where he died of yellow fever while studying the disease for the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.

His fellow researchers Alexander F. Mahaffy and Henry Beeuwkes kept records of Noguchi's temperature, blood test results and other physical data after he returned to Accra from Lagos, Nigeria, having first experienced symptoms of the infectious disease on May 11, 1928. The archive includes a line chart of his temperature that terminates on May 21, the day of his death.