Jennerian Vaccination and the Creation of a National Public Health Agenda in Japan, 1850–1900

Vaccination played a leading role in transforming the social and political status of medicine in Japanese society in the second half of the nineteenth century. The process began well before the Meiji Restoration of 1868 created a centralized government under the Japanese emperor. At the beginning of the century, medicine was a private business. There was no oversight from an interested government, and there were no medical societies or journals in which to debate and formulate opinion about medical practice. Medical knowledge was transmitted privately through personal lineage structures whose members jealously guarded their medical techniques. For almost a half century before live vaccine could be imported, knowledge of vaccination was limited to a small group of Japanese physicians who could read Dutch. This special knowledge created a medical elite whose members managed the transmission of vaccination after the vaccine arrived, and dominated the new medical and public health bureaucracies created by the Meiji state. By the end of the century, a rigorous vaccination program was in place, smallpox mortality had fallen, and Japan's Western-oriented physicians were in control of a national public health bureaucracy that could monitor the vaccination status of individuals in households throughout Japan.