Rangaku (the Dutch Learning) - Medicine
from Kulmus, Johann Adam. Kaitai shinsho. (Tōbu [Edo]: Suharaya Ichibē shi, An'ei 3 [1774]). Courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
In Hakuouki, the late-and-largely-unlamented Yukimura Koudou was a Rangaku Doctor. So was the Shinsengumi’s real-life consulting doctor Matsumoto Ryojun. So what exactly was Rangaku?
Rangaku 蘭学literally means “Dutch learning,” but all Western studies fell under the name Rangaku. The origin of the name goes back to the years when the small Dutch trading post of Dejima in Nagasaki was the only Western presence in Japan. (Holland as pronounced in Japanese is ‘Oranda.’ So the kanji 蘭 (orchid) with the reading of 'ran’, was assigned to write Dutch.)
Rangaku Medicine has a fascinating story. The skeletons above are from a Japanese translation of Dutch translation of a German anatomical text. The book entered Japan via Dejima, and then was translated by a very motivated group of Japanese doctors. These doctors had to learn Dutch with very limited resources just to translate the book.
How the ‘modern’ code was cracked is a really good short retelling of the story published in the Japan Times. It begins with the 1771 autopsy of an obscure murderer known to history as The Green Tea Hag.
The headless body of a woman in her 50s was laid on a straw mat inside a hut at Kotsukahara in Edo’s Senju area. Born in Kyoto and nicknamed “Aochababa,” sketchy court records indicate the woman had been convicted of killing her adopted children. She had been executed by beheading that very morning, March 4, 1771.
Forty-seven year-old Maeno Ryotaku, Sugita Genpaku, 37, Nakagawa Jun’an, 31, and several other doctors in the hut were eagerly waiting for dissection to begin on this rare occasion when permission for the procedure had been granted.
Read More of the article here.
On a more scholarly note, you could read this six-page article by John E. Van Sant: Rangaku Medicine and “Foreign” Knowledge in Late Tokugawa Japan (pdf). This article covers some of the same ground as the Japan Times article, then outlines Rangaku medicine up to the last years of the shogunate.
There is one bit at the end of the article that made my teeth grind: Van Sant’s explanation of the Bakumatsu is awful. And young Emperor Meiji was not really a driving force in the modernization of Japan. He was a teenager without any say in “his” new government. But as a basic overview of the Dutch Medicine in Japan, it’s a good read.
dededos
discoholicmusic
janainaart
dailybridgerton
vaporwave
origamiaround
baratheonpilled
blakekathryn
