Japanese Medical Lives in Transformation : Contesting Modernity in the Late Nineteenth Century

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. Most trained in the Dutch-style medicine which had become popular in the middle of the Tokugawa era, but they ultimately struggled with the transition to modernity. To what extent was their background in premodern Western-style medicine an advantage in adapting to the Meiji era? Who were the winners and who were the losers in the modernization process? What personal and professional challenges did they face? This book is shaped by these broad questions and the informative life trajectories of six fascinating contemporaries.

Ellen Gardner Nakamura is Senior Lecturer in Japanese and Asian Studies at University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is the author of Practical Pursuits: Takano Choei, Takahashi Keisaku, and Western Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Japan (2005).

Christopher Gerteis is an historian of Modern and Contemporary Japan at SOAS University of London, UK and The University of Tokyo, Japan. His first book, Gender Struggles: Wage-earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan (2009), is an interdisciplinary study of the forgotten history of wage-earning Japanese women who during the 1950s militantly contested the socialist labor movement's revival of many prewar notions of normative gender roles. His second book, Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation (forthcoming), examines the forces that shaped the political consciousness of Japanese youth who engaged in political violence during the 1960s and 1970s. It unpacks how notions of class and gender shaped the discourses produced by, and for, young men and women of the 'Sixties Generation'. Dr Gerteis is co-editor of the Bloomsbury book Japan since 1945: from Postwar to Post-Bubble (2012) and is Founding Series Editor of the Bloomsbury series SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary. He also served as Chief Editor of the interdisciplinary academic journal Japan Forum from 2014 through 2019.