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

Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan. By Hoi-Eun Kim. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2014. xvi, 249 pages. $55.00, cloth; $55.00, E-book.

How is one to explain the rapid and “seismic transformation … of medical science [in] Meiji Japan in just thirty years?” asks Hoi-Eun Kim. His answer is basically that from about 1870 Japanese medical authorities found German medicine an attractive model to follow and acted accordingly. In posing this question and providing this answer, Kim seems to be retelling a familiar story. But this is misleading; he gives only cursory attention to the Tokugawa background to modern Japanese medicine. The real contribution of the book is its analysis of how one country influences another and the thoughtful, nuanced account he offers of this process. He correctly emphasizes that the Japanese as protégés and the Germans as mentors each had agency. In his words, the historian of cultural borrowing should adopt a transnational perspective, consider reciprocal relations and engage in what Kim, borrowing from Lawrence Stone, has called “double prosopography” (p. 9).¹

One of the first things we learn is that the drawing together of Japan and Germany in medical science was not the result of some inexorable, abstract process but rather followed the initiatives of particular people on each side (Iwasa Jun, Sagara Chian, and Guido Verbeck for Japan; Max von Brandt, Theodor von Holleben, Ernst von Bülow for the Germans). Nor did it have anything to do with some kind of constitutional affinity between the two countries, with a common tradition of rule by a military elite, or with geopolitics as commonly understood. In the field of medicine, Germany had many attractions for Japan as well as for other countries.

Between 1870 and 1914, it had three times the number of universities of any other European country; thus, there were more professors of distinction than anywhere else. There was the unique German tradition of peregrinato academica that allowed students once admitted to move their enrollment easily from one institution to another. And with their systemic emphasis on research and publication as a requirement for advancement, German-speaking medical scientists led most of Europe not only in long-established fields such as pathology, anatomy, and surgery but also in the vital, newly emerging specialty of bacteriology or—as the French called it—microbiology.

The process of acquiring and expanding a tradition of medical expertise in Japan followed fairly predictable, straightforward channels. Two military physicians, Theodor Hoffmann and Leopold Müller, arrived from Prussia in 1870—there was as yet no Germany—while a small number of Japanese were dispatched to German-speaking institutions about the same time. Everyone had difficulty. The Germans spoke no Japanese, and even the Japanese who translated their lectures at first lacked the breadth of vocabulary needed for the purpose. Things got better eventually. In 1873 the Japanese government recalled its overseas students, and language proficiency standards were imposed after 1875. Hoffmann and Müller were succeeded by Emil Schultze and Albrecht Wernich that year; and they in turn by Julius Scriba and Erwin Baelz in 1881. The exorbitant cost of the German professors’ salaries helped to accelerate their replacement by Japanese successors. There were no more Germans after 1900.

Important as the German professors were at this early stage, the contribution to modern medicine of the Japanese who studied in Germany was greater. Kim declares that we cannot establish with real certainty how many studied abroad in this period. But he is able to show that the numbers in Berlin alone could not have been fewer than 627 people, at least two of whom were women. He thinks that about 30 per cent were funded by one or another government agency. Others, who paid their own way, did so because they judged the career benefits to be worth the investment. The professional success of one of the women ryūgakusei (overseas student) makes the point: Despite many obstacles at both the Japanese...