Organizer: Barbara J. Brooks, City University of New York
Chair: Susan L. Burns, University of Texas, Austin
Discussant: Carol Ann Benedict, Georgetown University
Beginning in the 1870s, medicine became an important object of governmental policy in Japan, because the achievement of the goal of "Rich Nation, Strong Military" required the production of healthy workers and soldiers. The new state attempted to exercise control over the health of its citizens with the promulgation of laws and policy statements under the rubric of a "medical policy" that called for a national system of public health and the regulation of medical expertise and acceptable practice. The Japanese government also authorized the establishment of new institutions—hospitals, asylums, and sanitariums. At the same time, new forms of public discourse arose that addressed medical issues in popular publications as well as in the new universities.
Our panel aims to address the "politicization" of medicine that occurred between 1870 and 1925 from three perspectives. Susan Burns’ paper discusses how one disease—leprosy—became the contested object of state and popular discourse in the late Meiji period. Kanazu Hidemi’s paper analyzes the politics of writing medical history in the Meiji and Taisho period in relation to the fields of gynecology and obstetrics. Barbara Brooks extends the discussion beyond Japan proper in her focus on the importance of medicine and its practitioners in the colonial project in Korea and Manchuria, where the state fostered the extension of the authority of an integrated, imperial medical establishment. Carol Benedict will offer comments based on her own work on medicine and the state in modern China.
The Formation of Japanese Obstetrics: The "Discovery" of its Origin in the Kagawa School of Obstetrics
Hidemi Kanazu, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
In modern medical histories, Japanese obstetrics has been posited as a counter-discourse to obstetrical practices in Europe and America, especially those of Germany, based upon the "discovery" of the Kagawa school of obstetrics, which took form in the mid-Edo period. In 1895, Kure Shuzô and Fujikawa Yû edited the Nihon sanka sôsho [A Collection of Japanese Obstetrical Texts] which brought together works that dated from the Sengo and Edo periods. The purpose of this volume was to "correct" the mistaken understanding of Japanese practices then current in Europe, especially Germany. It aimed to demonstrate that before the introduction of Western medicine, Japan possessed a "tradition" of obstetrics. Central to "traditional Japanese obstetrics" was the practice of the Kagawa school. Then, in 1919, Ogata Masaki, then studying in Germany, wrote as his doctoral, Nihon sankagaku shi [A History of Japanese Obstetrics]. In his preface, Ogata stated, "my purpose is to demonstrate that Japanese obstetrics was established and developed independently from Western obstetrics." As a result, his work traces "Japanese obstetrics" from the "Divine Age" to the late Meiji period. In this account too, the formation of the Kagawa school is a central event—it marks the beginning of a "modern" "surgical" obstetrics in Japan.
In this presentation, I want to explore not this "narrative of development," but rather to focus upon the politicality of the notion of "Japanese obstetrics
" itself as a form of knowledge.Reinventing Disease: Leprosy in Meiji Japan
Susan L. Burns, The University of Texas, Austin
In 1907, the Meiji government promulgated the "Law for the Prevention of Leprosy." Among its most important provisions were requirements that doctors report cases to public health authorities, that the authorities upon notification carry out the disinfection of the homes of those afflicted, and that victims of the disease with no means of support be provided with care in sanitariums. It was the third of these requirements that proved particularly difficult to institute. The central government ordered the construction of sanitariums in five prefectures, Tokyo, Aomori, Osaka, Kagawa, and Kumamoto. However, as prefectural governments attempted to buy land to construct the sanitariums they met with great opposition from residents of the proposed sites. In Kagawa, for example, fisherman argued that "germs" from the sanitarium might flow into the nearby sea, infect the fish and shellfish there, and ruin their livelihood.
This kind of opposition is particularly startling in light of the fact that well into the Meiji period, those afflicted with leprosy were a visible part of life in Japan. While the disease was certainly stigmatized, the notion that it was hereditary in nature meant that those infected were not subject to exclusion. The bacillicus that causes leprosy was identified in 1874 by the Norwegian doctor, Gerhard Hansen. As this became known in Japan, flawed and problematic conceptions of "contagion" and "infection" became associated with the disease. In this presentation, I will explore the popular "medical" discourse on leprosy and its effect upon the social understanding of those infected.
Structures of Knowledge: Medicine and its Institutions in Japanese Colonial Culture
Barbara J. Brooks, City University of New York
In a comparative framework, this paper will explore the extent and significance of medical knowledge and authority in the construction of Japanese colonial culture in Korea and Manchuria. An extensive literature on colonial medicine has illuminated Western medicine as a "tool of imperialism" that came to advocate some of the colonizers’ greatest interventions into indigenous societies in the name of public health. Research in European colonialism has also addressed the role of medical judgment in stigmatizing the colonized as backward, unsanitary, and disease-ridden, thus contributing to the construction of discursive boundaries separating colonizer from colonized. In colonial Korea and the Kantôshû, the Japanese built extensive medical facilities that employed some of the empire’s most distinguished physicians, who wrote both technical and popular treatises on medicine in the colonies. This paper will argue that this medical establishment and the knowledge it disseminated, particularly in the colonial press, were even more authoritative in the ordering of colonial society than what has been described for the European cases. Indeed, given the centrality of the "politics of medicine" in Japan from the opening of the Meiji era, the colonial project had to be intimately linked to medical authority, embodied in an empire-wide, integrated system of medical institutions, as proof of a civilizing mission of modernity.