Early Japanese medicine has not much to distinguish
it from the Chinese. At first purely theurgic,
the practice was later characterized by acupuncture
and a refined study of the pulse. It has an extensive
literature, largely based upon the Chinese, and extending
as far back as the beginning of the Christian era.
European medicine was introduced by the Portuguese
and the Dutch, whose “factory” or “company”
physicians were not without influence upon practice.
An extraordinary stimulus was given to the belief
in European medicine by a dissection made by Mayeno
in 1771 demonstrating the position of the organs as
shown in the European anatomical tables, and proving
the Chinese figures to be incorrect. The next
day a translation into Japanese of the anatomical
work of Kulmus was begun, and from its appearance in
1773 may be dated the commencement of reforms in medicine.
In 1793, the work of de Gorter on internal medicine
was translated, and it is interesting to know that
before the so-called “opening of Japan”
many European works on medicine had been published.
In 1857, a Dutch medical school was started in Yedo.
Since the political upheaval in 1868, Japan has made
rapid progress in scientific medicine, and its institutions
and teachers are now among the best known in the world.(28)
(28) See Y. Fujikawa,
Geschichte der Medizin in Japan,
Tokyo, 1911.
CHAPTER II — GREEK MEDICINE
OGRAIAE gentis decus! let us sing with Lucretius,
one of the great interpreters of Greek thought.
How grand and how true is his paean!
Out of the night, out
of the blinding night
Thy beacon flashes;—hail,
beloved light
Of Greece and Grecian;
hail, for in the mirk
Thou cost reveal each
valley and each height.
Thou art my leader,
and the footprints shine,
Wherein I plant my own....
* * * * *
The world was shine
to read, and having read,
Before thy children’s
eyes thou didst outspread
The fruitful page of
knowledge, all the wealth
Of wisdom, all her plenty
for their bread.
(Bk. III.—Translated
by D. A. Slater.)
Let us come out of the murky night
of the East, heavy with phantoms, into
the bright daylight of the West, into the company of
men whose thoughts made our thoughts, and
whose ways made our ways—the men who
first dared to look on nature with the clear eyes of
the mind.
Browning’s famous poem, “Childe Roland
to the Dark Tower Came,” is an allegory of the
pilgrimage of man through the dark places of the earth,
on a dismal path beset with demons, and strewn with
the wreckage of generations of failures. In his
ear tolled the knell of all the lost adventurers,
his peers, all lost, lost within sight of the dark
Tower itself—
The round squat turret,
blind as the fool’s heart,
Built of brown stone,
without a counterpart
In the whole world.
