The politics of disease: Beriberi, barley, and medicine in modern Japan (1700--1939)

My dissertation examines the modernization of medicine in Japan. Using beriberi (vitamin B1 deficiency disease) as a lens, I trace the transition from the pre-modern world of Chinese medicine or kanpo to the modern world of western medicine. In the Edo period (1603-1867), Japan had a vibrant medical culture based on kanpo practitioners and pharmacists. After the Meiji Restoration, the new government adapted Western medical institutions to establish a modern public health regime. Although modern doctors tried to eradicate traditional medicine, it survived and continued to be an important form of medical treatment for the masses. Meiji Japan was medically plural: Cosmopolitan (Western) medicine existed alongside traditional medicine. Until the discovery of vitamins in the 1910s, many Western medicine doctors relied on kanpo practices to treat the disease. In other words, a form of hybrid medicine emerged from the medically plural environment of the Meiji period. The integration of Chinese medicine was highly contested, and formed the basis of the forty-year "beriberi debate" (kakke ronso) waged between Imperial Japanese Navy physicians and doctors in the Army and from Tokyo Imperial University concerning this issue. The debate was of considerable political significance because the disease was an added cost of empire. During Japan's wars in Asia, incidence rates were astonishingly high: Over 300,000 men were hospitalized with this disease during the Russo-Japanese War. Because of the enormity of the epidemic, military doctors turned to practices found within Chinese medicine to develop a set of preventative measures. I argue that this hybrid medicine played a pivotal role in the development of the science surrounding beriberi research as well as empire building in modern Japan.