page_title: Rangaku
section_title: Medical sciences
hierarchical_section_title: Rangaku / Types / Medical sciences
caption_attribution_description: Japan's first treatise on Western anatomy, 1774. National Science Museum, Tokyo. Photograph by PHG, 2004.
context_page_description: Rangaku is a body of knowledge developed by Japan through its contacts with the Dutch enclave of Dejima, which allowed Japan to keep abreast of Western technology and medicine in the period when the country was closed to foreigners, 1641–1853, because of the Tokugawa shogunate's policy of national isolation.
  Through Rangaku, some people in Japan learned many aspects of the scientific and technological revolution occurring in Europe at that time, helping the country build up the beginnings of a theoretical and technological scientific base, which helps to explain Japan's success in its radical and speedy modernization following the forced American opening of the country to foreign trade in 1854.
context_section_description: From around 1720, books on medical sciences were obtained from the Dutch, and then analyzed and translated into Japanese. Great debates occurred between the proponents of traditional Chinese medicine and those of the new Western learning, leading to waves of experiments and dissections. The accuracy of Western learning made a sensation among the population, and new publications such as the Anatomy (蔵志, Zōshi, lit. "Stored Will") of 1759 and the New Text on Anatomy (解体新書, Kaitai Shinsho, lit. "Understanding [of the] Body New Text") of 1774 became references. The latter was a compilation made by several Japanese scholars, led by Sugita Genpaku, mostly based on the Dutch-language Ontleedkundige Tafelen of 1734, itself a translation of Anatomische Tabellen (1732) by the German author Johann Adam Kulmus.
  In 1804, Hanaoka Seishū performed the world's first general anaesthesia during surgery for breast cancer (mastectomy). The surgery involved combining Chinese herbal medicine and Western surgery techniques, 40 years before the better-known Western innovations of Long, Wells and Morton, with the introduction of diethyl ether (1846) and chloroform (1847) as general anaesthetics.
  In 1838, the physician and scholar Ogata Kōan established the Rangaku school named Tekijuku. Famous alumni of the Tekijuku include Fukuzawa Yukichi and Ōtori Keisuke, who would become key players in Japan's modernization. He was the author of 1849's Introduction to the Study of Disease (病学通論, Byōgaku Tsūron), which was the first book on Western pathology to be published in Japan.
caption: Japan's first full translation of a Western book on anatomy (Kaitai Shinsho), published in 1774. (National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo).
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