Beriberi, Military Medicine, and Medical Authority in Prewar Japan

Abstract

This article examines the development of Western medicine in Japan as reflected in the forty-year beriberi debate (1885–1925). Beriberi, a disease\ that we now know is caused by vitamin B1 deficiency, was a major public health problem that cut across social boundaries, even afflicting the Meiji\ Emperor. Outbreaks debilitated the military and thus threatened nationalsecurity. The principal opponents in the were navy doctors on one side\ and army surgeons and Tokyo Imperial University on the other. Usingmedical statistics, navy deduced that the cause was a protein deficient diet,\ and treated the disease effectively by adding barley to navy rations. Army and university doctors believed that it was caused by a yet-to-be discovered\ bacillus and also maintained that only laboratory-based data, not statistics, could be regarded as legitimate scientific evidence. Moreover, they saw the\ use of barley as derivative of traditional medicine. Traditional medicine, or kanpō, used barley in tandem with herbal drug prescriptions to treat\ this disease, but kanpō was seen by the elite of the Western-trained medical community as an unscientific remnant of the feudal past that had no\ place in modern Japan. Yet in practice, it did. Meiji Japan was medically plural; cosmopolitan or scientific medicine existed alongside traditional\ medicine. Some doctors practicing Western medicine relied on kanpō practices to treat beriberi. Integration of traditional medicine and Western\ medicine was, however, highly contested, and resistance to it formed one of the bases of the beriberi debate.

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