In 1859, some American Protestant denominations started medical missions in Japan. The medical
missionaries tried to eliminate the Japanese people’s prejudice against Christianity by offering medical
care and education to the local communities. In the 1870s, several young medical students and
ambitious medical practitioners asked the American medical missionaries for instruction about Western
medicine. The current scholarship has overlooked the work of these American medical missionaries
and has narrowed its focus to the German physicians who worked at the University of Tokyo and
influenced the Japanese physicians with German medicine. This paper aims to demonstrate how the
American medical missionaries were appreciated in early Meiji Osaka. First, I outline the background of
the American Protestant missions, which dispatched many medical missionaries in the 1870s. Second,
I describe the activities of the American medical missionaries in Osaka from the 1870s until the mid-
1880s, focusing on Arthur H. Adams and Wallace Taylor from the American Board of Commissioners
for Foreign Missions and on Henry Laning from the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of
America. Finally, I examine how these medical missionaries were engaged in the medical education of
both medical students and physicians.
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