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This chapter examines the pharmaceutical aspects of the new knowledge available in the East Asian macroculture and how Kajiwara Shōzen benefited from access to and information about materia medica transported along the so-called Pharmaceutical Silk Road. The chapter first considers the increasing availability of overseas materia medica as well as the technical challenges faced by Shōzen in trying to understand formulas and materia medica. It then discusses some of the changes in Chinese medicine between the Tang and Song eras and the influence of Islamic medicine on Song medicine. It also explores the new illness category of disorders of qi and how it was understood by Shōzen. It concludes with some examples of Shōzen's use of formulas to illustrate how the preceding elements converged to influence Japanese medicine.

Chapter 8 examines the crucial debate on “the Unification of Nomenclature of Chinese Diseases,” the first and most important step in the efforts by the Institute of National Medicine to scientize Chinese medicine. The key issues of this debate were whether or not to assimilate the germ theory and the related ontological conception of disease into Chinese medical theory, and second, what the proper categorical relationship should look like between infectious diseases as defined by the germ theory and the two major traditional Chinese disease categories of Cold Damage and Warm Disease? Despite the fact that this debate failed to reach a consensus, the official category of notifiable infectious disease was incorporated into the organizing principles of disease classification in Chinese medicine. Drawing on the Japanese style of Chinese Medicine, practitioners of Chinese medicine developed the incipient form of what later became the defining feature of so-called “Traditional Chinese Medicine” (TCM), namely “pattern differentiation and treatment determination.”

This chapter examines the impact of Song medical texts in medieval Japan and more specifically how they restructured the landscape of knowledge about Japanese medicine. Against a background of the scarcity of Japanese medical works and the plethora of information that became available in a new media as a result of the Song printing revolution, the chapter describes the contours of what is best understood as the appropriating context of Song-period Chinese medicine. It also looks at the variety of Song printed medical works as well as some of the works that Kajiwara Shōzen consulted. Some Chinese medical works are noted in the Ton'ishō and others in the Man'anpō. The chapter concludes by discussing the ways in which Shōzen benefited from Song medical knowledge and how print culture in China helped him become familiar with Song-period Chinese medicine.

This chapter traces the development of epidemiology in Japan. One of the main drivers to the growth in importance of epidemiology and its involvement in health policy was partly the investigation of a number of major environmental disasters, such as cadmium and mercury poisoning, and the need to follow up the survivors of the atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to better understand the long-term effects of radiation exposure. Japan also showed the way in the exploitation of disease registers — and now demonstrates the ability to investigate the cause of rare diseases through nationally coordinated studies.

This chapter searches for the sources of definitions and judgments of visual disability in Edo- and Meiji-period Japan. It argues that what is considered a “visual disability” is a historical and social determination, and not an “objective” one. Among the most important factors determining “blindness” in early modern Japan are economic pressures, religious discourses, and medical discourses. The combination of such forces produced or sought to produce what I have called a heteronomous and subaltern “disabled subject.” It was these determinations and their social consequences that goze sought to contest in practice when they established their occupational associations.