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Smallpox and the Epidemiological Heritage of Modern Japan: Towards a Total History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

Akihito Suzuki
Akihito Suzuki
Affiliation:
Akihito Suzuki, Professor, Department of Economics, Keio University, 4-1-1 Hiyoshi, Kohoku-ku, Yokohama-shi, Kanagawa 223-8521, Japan. Email: asuzuki@hc.cc.keio.ac.jp
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This article examines one of the long-term structural forces that contributed to the making of public health in Modern Japan. My overall argument is that the history of public health should be conceived as a total history, encompassing not just political, administrative, and scientific factors but also natural, social, and economic factors. Elsewhere I have discussed two of these factors in some detail, both of which were long-term structural forces resulting from the interactions of different realms: 1) the effect of the topography and the pattern of the use of land; and 2) the effect of the market as a medium for people's behaviour seeking the prevention of the disease. Here I will argue that the Japanese long-term experience of diseases provided another structural force that shaped public health in Japan. The long-term cumulative factor can be called the ‘epidemiological heritage’ of Japan.

Keywords

EpidemiologyPublic HealthComparative HistoryJapanSmallpoxPlagueCholera
Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 313 - 318
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 This paper does not discuss these two forces in detail. See Akihito Suzuki and Mika Suzuki, ‘Cholera, Consumer, and Citizenship: Modernization of Medicine in Japan’, in Hormoz Ebrahimnejad (ed.), The Development of Modern Medicine in Non-Western Countries: Historical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2009), 184–203.

2 Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe 1830–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

3 Richard Evans, ‘Epidemics and Revolutions: Cholera in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, in Terence Ranger and Paul Slack (eds), Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 149–74: 163.

4 Early epidemics of smallpox have been explained in detail in William Wayne Farris, Population, Disease, and Land in Early Japan, 645–900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).

5 Smallpox in early modern Japan has been closely examined in Ann Bowman Jannetta, Epidemics and Mortality in Early Modern Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Ann Jannetta, The Vaccinators: Smallpox, Medical Knowledge, and the ‘Opening’ of Japan (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). See also, Ann Bowman Jannetta and Samuel Preston, ‘Two Centuries of Mortality Change in Central Japan: The Evidence from a Temple Death Register’, Population Studies, 45 (1991), 417–36.

6 Jannetta, Epidemics and Mortality, ibid., 61–107.

7 Suda Keizō, Hida no Tōsō shi [History of Smallpox of Hida], (Gifu: Kyōiku Bunka Shuppan Kai, 1992), 32-4.

8 For smallpox epidemics in peripheral parts of Japan, see two excellent papers by Kōzai Toyoko, ‘Isetsu no nakano Hachijōjima’ [‘Hachijō Island in Medical Discourses’], Shisō, 1025 (2009), 46–71; idem, ‘Ainu ha naze ‘yamani nigeta’ ka’ [‘Why Did the Ainu Flee to the Mountain’?], Shisō, 1017 (2008), 78–101; see also, Kawamura Jun’ichi, Bungaku ni miru Tōsō [Smallpox in Literature] (Kyoto: Shibunkaku, 2006), 140–8, 180–2.