The Mission of Hippocrates in Japan: The Contribution of Philipp Franz von Siebold (review)

As its title suggests, this book celebrates the dissemination of Western medicine to Japan—a topic worthy of consideration by historians of medicine. Medicine was the vehicle by which most Western ideas were transmitted to Japan before that country was opened to regular communication with Westerners in the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, many of Japan’s most prominent political leaders in the late nineteenth century were men trained in Western-style medicine. Medicine was one of the few avenues that Japanese intellectuals curious about the outside world might explore without incurring the wrath of their xenophobic government; and it was also one of the few avenues of upward mobility open to talented young men of commoner rank.

Because of the peculiar arrangements that the Japanese government made with the Dutch East India Company early in the seventeenth century, knowledge of Western medical techniques reached Japan through the Dutch. From 1640, the Company maintained a tiny trading factory at Dejima, a compound in Nagasaki Bay where Company employees conducted trade, once a year, with special representatives of the shogunate. The Company always employed a physician to serve at Dejima; most often he was a Dutch national, but occasionally physicians from other European countries were hired to care for factory employees.

The Mission focuses on the transmission of contemporary medical knowledge to Japan by Philipp Franz von Siebold, a German physician who served as Company physician at Dejima during the 1820s. Von Siebold is well known in Japan: his teachings mobilized a small group of Japanese intellectuals to learn Dutch, to translate Western books on medical subjects, to establish schools and teach what they had learned, and to experiment with Western medical and surgical techniques. Harmen Beukers establishes what von Siebold actually taught, and identifies the individuals who studied with him and who disseminated his teachings after his departure. Von Siebold has been a controversial figure: he is best known in the West for the information he brought back to Europe about Japanese flora and fauna, and for his part in the clearly treasonous activities that brought the wrath of the shogunate down upon his Japanese colleagues. Beukers, by providing detailed information about von Siebold’s medical background and the medical content of what he taught in Japan, has made an important contribution to our understanding of how Western medical knowledge was transmitted and exchanged between two very different cultures in the nineteenth century.

The book contains beautiful reproductions in color, of contemporary prints and drawings. The text is in both English and Japanese, an especially valuable feature, and presents translations of Dutch and Japanese documents in English for the first time. These documents demonstrate the intellectual and personal exchanges that took place between the Japanese and the Dutch under the most difficult of circumstances, and they show the important role played by medicine in making these exchanges possible. This book is a valuable resource for scholars who work on the history of early modern Japan, and for historians of medicine interested in the dissemination of medical knowledge. It is also an excellent reference book for students of world history.