Domesticating Medicine:The Production of Familial Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Japan

抄録

The second half of the Tokugawa period (1603‒1868) has been hailed by medical historians as a period of great innovation that witnessed an exponential rise in numbers of literate doctors and printed medical texts. Particularly in the nineteenth century, sufferers of illness in Japan increasingly gained access to an expanding medical marketplace, including the services of medical practitioners as well as a wide range of medical guidebooks. This article argues that, despite the availability of outside expertise, the home remained an important site of healing and medical knowledge-production, where literate families chose to create their own written accounts to document illnesses and therapies. An analysis of diaries and other nineteenth-century domestic records reveals how families tracked the efficacy of medicines, made note of promising new treatments, and even composed their own medicinal handbooks. By gathering, creating, and reproducing knowledge about therapies, sufferers and their families maintained their own valuable stores of medical wisdom.