Vaccination and the politics of medical knowledge in nineteenth-century Japan

© 2014, Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. The adoption of the cowpox vaccine in nineteenth-century Japan has often been seen as a more straightforward development than its introduction to other non-Western countries. However, the research leading to this conclusion has been based primarily on sources written by Japanese practitioners of Western- style medicine (ran), while the perspectives of Chinese-style (kan) practitioners, who were more numerous than ranpō practitioners but less likely to have shown immediate enthusiasm for vaccination, have been largely neglected. Kanpō... Mehr ...