抄録
Koan Ogata (1810-1863) was a physician who contributed the progression of Western medicine in Japan in the late Edo period. The medicine chest used for his medical treatments is now preserved at Osaka University. Most of the crude drugs he actually used are still in the chest, and they have provided us much information about Koan’s medical practice. There are also many other medicinal items inherited by Osaka University over the years.
For this study, in order to discuss Koan’s medical strategies, we tried to establish a statistical analysis of these historical heritages. We investigated the historical inheritances and documents pertaining to crude drugs as follows : i) Japanese Pharmacopoeia (JP, 1st-17th editions, issue years 1886-2016), ii) crude drug samples inherited by Osaka University (collected from around 1920-1950), and iii) medicinal documents issued between the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. We established a
database of the crude drugs included in those samples and analyzed them statistically. We selected 308 crude drugs from JP and investigated their presence in the samples and documents mentioned above. We analyzed that data statistically and found that the contents of the documents and samples depended on the medical background : the preferences of crude drugs used in Western medicine and Oriental medicine were completely different. Notably, we found that the contents of Koan’s medicine chest were different from both Western and Oriental samples. These results statistically suggest his medical strategies were a combination of both cultures in order to obtain better medication.
