2024 Volume 44 Issue 1 Pages 76-82
The year 2022 marks the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Kyoto Ryobyoin, which evolved into the Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine. In November 2022, lectures honoring Ferdinand Adalbert Junker von Langegg（Junker）were held at the annual meeting of the Japan Society for Clinical Anesthesia. This paper is an amalgamation of these lectures.
Junker qualified in Vienna, worked as a general physician, surgeon and obstetrician and gynaecologist in London, Berlin, Kyoto, Leipzig and Vienna, and also spent time as an army doctor during some of these travels, before returning to the country of his birth, Austria, at the end of his career.
Junker stayed in Japan from 1872 to 1876. Junker contributed to the modernization of medical care as the first foreign doctor and teacher at Kyoto Ryobyoin Hospital. Junker was the only anesthesiologist among the “hired foreigners” employed to change Japan into a modern country during the Meiji Restoration. Junker’s inhaler, which he developed in 1867, has been improved and used for generations. Junker’s career was very unusual for the time and still presents many unanswered questions.
As the second part of a three-part series, this article describes Junker’s career up to his arrival at the Kyoto Ryobyoin Hospital, including the development of Junker’s inhaler, as well as his education and treatment at the hospital after he arrived in Kyoto.
