Article ID: CBB001214340

Relocating Psychiatric Knowledge: Meiji Psychiatrists, Local Culture(s), and the Problem of Fox Possession (2012)

unapi

Burns, Susan L. (Author)


Historia Scientiarum: International Journal of the History of Science Society of Japan
Volume: 22, no. 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 88-109


Publication Date: 2012
Edition Details: Part of a special issue, “Social History of Medicine in Modern Japan”
Language: English

In Japan before modernity, possession by foxes or other animals was one means of explaining madness, and although some early modern doctors expressed skepticism about this phenomenon, it was not until the Meiji period that the idea of fox possession came under sustained attack, initially by public officials and "enlightened" intellecutuals who attacked it as an irrational superstition. Beginning in the late 1870s, fox possession became the object of exploration on the part of Japanese doctors, who sought to understand it through the lens of German psychiatric theory. This paper traces the attempt by Japanese physicians to "rethink" fox possession and exposes the professional, methodological, and social tensions that shaped this process. I argue that while German psychiatric theory provided a set of tools to Japan's first generation of psychiatrists, allowing them to make sense of their patients' afflictions via new diagnostic and other categories, it also occluded their ability to view fox possession as something other than a manifestation of individual pathology. The case of fox possession thus illuminates the complications of the transfer of a body of medical knowledge to a new cultural context.

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Included in

Article Takayanagi, Hideko; Jannetta, Ann; Asami, Ryuji; Nakamura, Ellen; Abe, Osamu; Kitagawa, Hiroyuki; Miyajima, Toshihiro; Iryu, Yasufumi (2012) Translating Medical Knowledge: Japan's First Medical Journal---Taisei Meii Iko. Historia Scientiarum: International Journal of the History of Science Society of Japan (pp. 68-87). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001214340/

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Authors & Contributors
Fabiana Lopes da Silveira
Vincenti, Denise
Lambe, Jennifer Lynn
Brancaccio, Maria Teresa
Thifault, Marie-Claude
Shuttleworth, Sally A.
Concepts
Science and culture
Gods; deities; spirits
Spiritualism
Psychiatry
Science and religion
Psychology
Time Periods
19th century
Ancient
20th century, early
Meiji period (Japan, 1868-1910)
20th century
18th century
Places
Great Britain
England
Japan
France
Middle and Near East
El Salvador
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