The names of nature: The development of natural history in Japan, 1600--1900

This study is a social and intellectual history of the discipline of honzogaku in Japan: from its beginning in the early years of the seventeenth century as a pharmacological sub-field of medicine through its evolution in the second half of the eighteenth century into an autonomous discipline of natural history to its ultimate merging into modern life sciences in the late nineteenth century. Its specialists developed a consistent methodology to describe and classify vegetable and animal species and exchanged the results of their research in a sophisticated scholarly language. In the process honzogaku scholars established themselves socially and professionally in specialized schools and state-institutions and produced a large number of works of value to both knowledge and society.;I argue that the evolution of honzogaku emerged in the specific historical context of Tokugawa Japan, which provided the social and cultural conditions for honzogaku ideas and practices to develop into a systematic discipline of natural studies. The long period of political stability and the growth in wealth and literacy combined with the patronage of the ruling classes and, later, a broad popular following to facilitate the transformation of a field of study, which in China remained an ancillary of medical practice but in Japan became a counterpart of what was then called "natural history" in Europe. Not only did these conceptions and practices survive the introduction of Western science in the second half of the nineteenth century, but were in part responsible for the rapid establishment of modern biology in the context of the new nation-state.