Constructing an Alternative Base of Medical Knowledge: Japan’s Response to Western Medicine in the Nineteenth Century
Organizer and Chair: Ann Jannetta, University of Pittsburgh
Panel Abstract: Medical knowledge was highly regarded and diligently sought in Japan from ancient times. Until the nineteenth century, medical concepts and practices imported from China dominated Japanese medicine; but European medical writings began reaching Japan with increasing frequency in the 1800s. These writings were copied, circulated and translated by Japanese physicians in many parts of Japan. During the nineteenth century, ideas associated with Western-style medicine would become a major catalyst for fundamental political and social change in Japan. What were these ideas? Why were they so influential? What changes did they provoke? Our panelists examine the ways in which Japanese physicians and other intellectuals responded to the influx of new medical ideas and practices that reached their shores: How to test the efficacy of new surgical techniques? How to deal with Chinese and Western naming practices in order to reliably identify and classify medicinal plants? How, and whether, to share useful new medical knowledge? How to create a new medical lexicon to reliably describe previously unknown diseases and concepts? Japan responded to these new challenges over the course of the nineteenth century as Western medical knowledge itself was undergoing fundamental change. Ultimately, the knowledge base constructed by Japan’s receptive physicians led Japan’s new Meiji government to formally adopt ‘Western medicine’ in the 1870s, and to establish a state bureaucracy committed to insuring its practice throughout Japan.
Innovation and Stagnation: Contrasting Approaches to Global Changes in Medical Knowledge in Early Nineteenth Century Japan
Ann Jannetta, University of Pittsburgh
Japan’s emergence from national isolation in the 19th century took place during an accelerating global transformation in scientific and medical knowledge. This knowledge became an important catalyst for change in Japan: it attracted adherents and generated innovative approaches among Japan’s intellectuals. Among these adherents, Japanese physicians were the most numerous, the most active, and the most important. This paper examines two different approaches to innovation within the community of Japanese physicians: the lineage approach of Hanaoka Seishū (1760-1835), recognized as the world’s first successful general anesthesiologist; and the network approach of Mitsukuri Genpo (1799-1863), a medical writer, translator and editor. The paper asks: Which of these innovative approaches to medicine led to further innovation and knowledge? And why? The answers to these questions provide additional insight into the reasons for Japan’s rapid transformation to modernity and acceptance by the international community. The paper will draw upon the literary production of Seishū and Genpo, including images from Hanaoka Seishu’s Casebook, featured on the website of the National Library of Medicine [NLM].
Public Exhibitions of Medicinal Plants and Debates about their Efficacy in Nineteenth Century Japan
Maki Fukuoka, University of Michigan
During the first half of the nineteenth century, two pillars of medical knowledge—one derived from “Chinese” tradition and the other based on western surgical and pharmacological medicine—were deployed in Japan, and an ample number of practicing physicians were trained in both. The existence of these two traditions did not present an ideological tension per se, but rather a practical problem: How to identify textually rendered knowledge vis-à-vis the actual plants available in their local ecology? In this context of disarray, a particular format of exhibition proved both useful and efficient as a way to navigate through the myriad pieces of knowledge, both old and new, to ascertain the medicinal efficacy of a plant. This presentation explores the practice of exhibition, known as honzō-kai in Japanese, which probed the mechanisms and tactics of displaying plants and other objects in order to negotiate between the textually rendered world of medicinal plants and the physically available local flora. I focus on the Shōhyaku-sha, a group of physicians in Owari domain, present day Nagoya, who organized monthly exhibitions with a specifically assigned theme. The physicians used this unique tool to illuminate, vet, and test one’s medical knowledge in an open public format. My presentation draws on illustrations including a contemporary flier calling for the submission of objects, and selected images from a published catalogue of the exhibitions.
Translation, Tradition, and the Politics of Medicine in Late Nineteenth Century Japan: Kure Shūzō and the Creation of Psychiatric Terminology
Susan L. Burns, University of Chicago
In 1892, Kure Shūzō, then a student at Tokyo University’s medical school, wrote a short article in which he argued that “hysteria” should not be romanized as hisuteri, using the phonetic katakana script, but should rather be identified using the Chinese term zōsōkyō (literally, “organ agitation madness”) written in Chinese characters. Kure argued that the term zōsō had a long history in Sino-Japanese medicine, appearing first in the works of the latter Han era physician Zhong Ji (c. 150-c. 219). Significantly, Kure did not argue that zōsōkyō was merely an apt “translation” of hysteria. Rather, he used the strategy of analogy to provide a “Japanese” history for a diagnostic category that originated in European psychiatric discourse. Kure’s concern for creating a new medical vocabulary was not his alone. The state supported project of institutionalizing “Western medicine” that began in the 1870s required the creation of a new medical lexicon, but the process was a contentious one as physicians argued about how to accurately convey new conceptions of disease at a time when medical discourse in Europe was also in flux. Kure was the central figure in creating a new psychiatric vocabulary through the publication in 1894-1895 of his massive work, the Essentials of Psychiatry, the first Japanese authored textbook of psychiatry. This paper will explore the strategies that Kure used as a point of access into the tensions between the aim of accuracy and the claims of “tradition” that shaped the medical translation project as a whole.
Discussant: Akihito Suzuki, Economic History, Keiō University, Tokyo