Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan by Hoi-Eun Kim (review)

The past years have seen a small flurry of publications on the history of science, technology, and medicine in imperial Japan, with medicine proving to be a particularly fruitful area of inquiry. The influence of German medical educators and education on the development of medicine in Meiji Japan is well known. In this asymmetrical relationship, Germany supplied teachers and medical training, and Japanese students and practitioners acquired German medical knowledge, modifying it to suit their needs. With Doctors of Empire, Hoi-Eun Kim seeks a fresh perspective, interpreting this encounter as a process of exchange in which the diverse actors, whether national governments, schools of medical theory, or individuals, pursued a variety of interests within an unequal partnership.

Kim emphasizes the reciprocity of these encounters, trying to avoid privileging Japan or Germany in the presentation. This necessitates looking at interactions at a number of levels, with the straightforward transmission of medical knowledge and training constituting only one meeting place among many. The focus of individual chapters alternates between German and Japanese perspectives and sites. One question that requires immediate attention is the motivation for this exchange at all. As Kim points out, while interest was reciprocal, Japanese and German governments pursued this intercultural contact for different reasons. Although Japan had restricted its contact with the West until the 1860s, earlier reception of Dutch medical knowledge paved the way for an eager reception of the German knowledge upon which this had been based, especially after the Meiji government began its modernization program. For the Prussian government, in particular, the possibility of exerting political influence in East Asia and developing trading relationships with Japan lay behind its willingness to send the requested physicians to modernize Japanese medical education. Despite these different motivations, German and Japanese interests intersected well – in the beginning, at least – but by the end of the century the German restructuring and modernization of Japanese medical education had been so successful that Japan could rely on its own medical professoriate and no longer needed German assistance. Prussian hopes to use medical education as a means to establish longer-term influence were thwarted by the Japanese government’s interest in filling the professorial ranks with its own citizens.

The five chapters of this book trace the experiences of three generations of German professors in Japan and Japanese students in Germany and later Japan. The groups and the information available about them differ strongly, and the lens is constantly shifting, moving from an institutional history and biographies of individual German physicians in Japan to a collective biography of Japanese students studying in Germany. Regardless of the motivations that governments had for pursuing this intellectual encounter, individuals had their own ideas of what they hoped to get out of it. The prosopographical study of Japanese medical students, their motivations and their experiences in Germany is particularly valuable. Synthesizing much German and Japanese-language material, Kim composes a group portrait of Japanese students in Berlin, including their social and support networks, forms of sociability, formal and private interactions with Germans, experiences of otherness and personal motivations. Well over 1,100 Japanese medical students visited German-speaking countries for some form of training in the period covered here, and, as Kim shows, their German experiences not only bound them into a recognizable social group but also became a prerequisite for success in the Japanese medical world.

In the following chapters, Kim discusses two examples of the effect these methods and theories had on medicine in Japan. The first example, the dispute about the causes of beriberi – a disagreement between Japanese representatives of different German schools, is treated in more depth by Alexander R. Bay in Beriberi in Modern Japan (University of Rochester Press, 2012). A lesser-known result of this intercultural encounter was the adoption of German anthropology in Japan. German physicians brought their particular mix of cultural and racial assumptions...