分別される生命―二十世紀社会の医療戦略

分別される生命―二十世紀社会の医療戦略 Osama Kawagoe and Akihito Suzuk, eds., Bunbetsu sareru seimei: nijisseiki shakai no iryo senryaku [Classifying Lives: Social Modernity and Medical Strategies in the Twentieth Century] Tokyo: Hosei Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 2008. 332 pp. ¥3,675. Akinobu Takabayashi Received: 31 August 2008 /Accepted: 31 August 2008 /Published online: 7 October 2009 # National Science Council, Taiwan 2009 A multidisciplinary project, Bunbetsu sareru seimei: nijisseiki shakai no iryo senryaku (Classifying Lives: Social Modernity and Medical Strategies in the Twentieth Century) is the work of nine experts on the history, sociology, and philosophy of medicine in Japan and Europe. In Osamu Kawagoe’s introduction, “Life and Medicine in the Twentieth Century”, the rise of a “risk society” is described, a zone in which increasing numbers of destabilized lives are governed by measures composed jointly by medicine and society. Kawagoe illustrates this by referring to the improvement of life expectancy in nineteenth-century Germany, to which he attributes a growing value placed on life and a view of death as unusual. Factors that jeopardized health were countered by public hygiene, population control, birth control, and medical insurance. Twentieth-century medicine—not just in Germany, but in all industrialized Western states—pursued the goal of reducing the risk in human life. Working from this model, the book’s authors examine the advent of risk society in Japan, with a number of German and English case studies added for comparison. In Chapter 1, Mima examines how physical risk was constructed as a social risk, showing that twenty-first-century bodies at risk are controlled for the sake of social stability. In a case study of a new strain of influenza, he identifies the social construction of risk. Borrowing from Ulrich Beck’s 1986 study of Risikogesellschaft (risk society), he argues that industrialization has changed how we see disease. While the body was long perceived as a source of national and individual wealth, a East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2009) 3:393–395 DOI 10.1007/s12280-009-9095-4 A. Takabayashi (*) Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, School of Economics, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: atakabayashi@nifty.com wave of quickly moving global diseases has cast the body as a risk in the campaign against sickness, disaster, terror, and environmental toxins. This may be seen especially clearly in the panic that surrounds the announcement of new flu strains. Early American reports about the recent outbreak of H1N1 influenza identified it with the Spanish flu and predicted another health disaster—which never occurred. Such panics, Mima argues, suggest how events that appear to be scientifically grounded are in fact subject to the most subjective readings. Mima’s study should be set alongside recent historical studies of science and medicine in Asia—for instance, Kai Khiun Liew’s study of the social construction of the flu pandemic in Southeast Asia (Liew 2007; see also Sleigh et al. 2006). In Chapter 2, Ikai presents an original work on the historical sociology of hospitalization in modern Japan. To understand why Japanese hospitals rarely admit elderly patients, Ikai considers the historical competition among general practitioners whose clinics—complete with beds—came to offer more and more nontherapeutic treatments. Unlike the West, which has inclined to a rigorous distinction between urgent care and long-term care, Japanese hospitals have historically been far less compartmentalized, increasing the number of beds available for general purposes. In Chapter 3, Yamashita considers the historical debate on the “quality and quantity of nurses”. Yamashita has uncovered this topic by carefully examining contemporary arguments about how nurses should be trained and certified. With the rise of what one might call “the Age of Hospitalization”, the need for properly trained nurses became acute, as both the public and local governments strongly advocated formal educational and licensing procedures. Yamashita concludes that the Japanese age of hospitalization gave birth to a new culture in which health authorities and the public called for the improvement of nursing services. In Chapter 4, Suzuki pursues an approach that he calls “horizontal”, distinguishing his contribution from the others in a book that concentrates on the controlling, or vertical, aspects of modern medicine. Reading over 2,000 replies to a health survey...