Popularization of Psychiaric Knowledge in Modern Japan at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Focusing on the Newspaper Coverage of Mental Disorders (2012)
Sato, Masahiro (Author)
Historia Scientiarum: International Journal of the History of Science Society of Japan
Volume: 22, no. 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 110-124
Edition Details: Part of a special issue, “Social History of Medicine in Modern Japan”
Language: English
This paper explores a few socio-historical processes through which Western psychiatric knowledge was disseminated and popularized in modern Japanese society at the turn of the twentieth century. Through a comprehensive study of newspaper coverage on mental disorders from the early Meiji Period to the turn of the twentieth century, I discovered three main pathways through which Western psychiatric knowledge was disseminated. One mode is a series of articles that reported the lecture meetings of psychiatric professionals. The second type of articles comprised statistical surveillance reports that insisted that the number of mental patients was increasing. The last type of articles was reportage that offered information on the contemporary state of mental hospitals and the daily lives of confined people. Through these three types of articles, the Japanese public in the Meiji Period must have begun to comprehend the seriousness of the disease and the significance of Western medical knowledge, which was believed to be applicable in cures for patients with psychotic disorders and in the improvement of public mental hygiene.
...MoreArticle 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).
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