Japanese Medical Lives in Transformation: Contesting Modernity in the Late Nineteenth Century (SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan)

At the end of the 19th century, Japanese modernizers abandoned the traditional Chinese-style medicine that had dominated for centuries, and turned instead to Western medical theory and practice.In this book, Ellen Gardner Nakamura reconsiders the story of the adoption of Western medicine through the eyes of six medical practitioners. The men who took the lead in transforming Japanese medicine under the new Meiji government were Western-style Japanese physicians, an enthusiastic minority who had studied European medical texts and techniques in the era before the ‘opening’ of Japan.Their achievements in creating the institutions of modern Japanese medicine are celebrated in almost every Japanese medical history book.Japanese Medical Lives in Transformation, on the other hand, focuses on a selection of lesser-known men and women whose roles in the transformation of Japanese medicine were important but unspectacular.The Japanese doctors discussed here had various educational backgrounds.Mo