The Case of the Suzhou Hospital of National Medicine (1939-41): War, Medicine, and Eastern Civilization.

This article explores the founding of the Suzhou Hospital of National Medicine in 1939 during the Japanese occupation of Suzhou. We argue that the hospital was the culmination of a period of rich intellectual exchange between traditional Chinese and Japanese physicians in the early twentieth century and provides important insights into the modern development of medicine in both countries. The founding of this hospital was followed closely by leading Japanese Kampo physicians. As the Japanese empire expanded into East Asia, they hoped that they could revitalize their profession at home by disseminating their unique interpretations of the famous Treatise on Cold Damage abroad. The Chinese doctors that founded the Suzhou Hospital of National Medicine were close readers of Japanese scholarship on the Treatise and were inspired to experiment with a Japanese approach to diagnosis, based on new interpretations of the concept of "presentation" (sho / zheng ). Unfortunately, the Sino-Japanese War cut short this fascinating dialogue on reforming medicine and set the traditional medicine professions in both countries on new nationalist trajectories.

Treating emotion-related disorders in Japanese traditional medicine: language, patients and doctors.

This paper analyses how the conceptual and therapeutic formation of Japanese traditional medicine (Kampo) has been socially constructed through interactions with popular interpretations of illness. Taking the example of emotion-related disorders, this paper focuses on the changing meaning of constraint (utsu) in Kampo medicine. Utsu was once a name for one of the most frequently cited emotion-related disorders and pathological concerns during the Edo period. With the spread of Western medicine in the Meiji period, neurasthenia replaced utsu as the dominant emotion-related disorder in Japanese society. As a result, post-Meiji doctors developed other conceptual tools and strategies to respond to these new disease categories, innovations that continue to influence contemporary practitioners. I begin this history by focusing on Wada Tokaku, a Japanese doctor of the Edo period who developed a unique theory and treatment strategy for utsu. Secondly, I examine. Yomuto Kyushin and Mori Dohaku, Kampo doctors of the early twentieth century, who privileged neurasthenia over utsu in their medical practice. The paper concludes with a discussion of the flexibility and complexity of Kampo medicine, how its theory and practices have been influenced by cross-cultural changes in medicine and society, while incorporating the popular experience of illness as well.

The Adaptation of the Treatise on Cold Damage in Eighteenth-century Japan: Text, Society, and Readers.

This paper examines how the Shanghanlun, translated as the Treatise on Cold Damage (i.e., the Treatise), one of the most revered Chinese medical texts of the Han dynasty, was used in Japanese traditional medicine (Kanpo ), and particularly how it was reconfigured to fit with the societal shifts of the Edo period in Japan. The versatility of the Treatise in the formation of Kanpo is exemplified by the medicine of Yoshimasu Todo, an innovative eighteenth-century Japanese doctor. In this analysis of Todo's unique interpretation of the Treatise, some of his transitional ideas about medicine, the human body, and illness, as well as the transcultural influence from China, will be elucidated. To this end, first Todo's application of the Treatise will be re-defined within the historical context of changing medical needs in the consumer society of the Edo period. Secondly, by focusing on the idea of poison that forms the core of Todo's theory and practice, I show how his pathology resonated with the period's popular notions of the human body and illness, although it was said at the time to be drawn from Chinese classics. Associating Todo's use of the Treatise with such phenomena as the commercialisation and popularisation of medical treatment and the popular imagination of illness, I show the applicability of the Treatise to the evolution of Kanpo in the context of the surrounding social structure and cross-cultural intellectual ebb and flow across East Asia.