When Medicine Participates in Field Studies:Epidemiological Research of Hansen's Disease during Pre- and Wartime Japan

Abstract

This paper explores the process through which Hansen's disease (leprosy) specialists in Japan introduced epidemiological methods in the 1930s from the international community of Hansen's disease medicine. The methodology used in field surveys initially started in rural areas as an academic interest in the patients' economic and social status, but epidemiology was soon applied to urban area studies, and then finally it was adopted as a tool of institutionalizing patients in the southernmost fringe of Japanese Empire. An examination of the development of an epidemiology of Hansen's disease reveals the ways that medical knowledge, gained from field research, was interpreted both medically and politically, and how these interpretations ultimately influenced the actual treatment of the sufferers in Japan's total-war period.