著者

松田 利夫 清水 勝

出版者

日本薬史学会

雑誌

薬史学雑誌 (ISSN:02852314)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.50, no.2, pp.159-164, 2015 (Released:2020-12-03)

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Blood components and plasma derivatives are two of the most useful tools in modern medicine. When the Portuguese opened the maritime routes to the Far East in the 16th century. Western medicine traveled to Japan on the trading vessels that carried physicians and barber-surgeons to care for the body and Christian missionaries to care for the soul. Skilled interpreters such as Kogyu Yoshio translated and studied Dutch editions of early medical books, like Lorenz Heister's Chirurgie (Nurnberg, 1719), that illustrate the concept of transfusion. The oldest description of transfusion originating in Japan is a handwritten manuscript entitled Bansui Sensi Chojutsu Shomoku by Masamichi Nishijima, a student of Bansui Otsuki. It is a list of Otsuki's translated works. He described book names and chapter names in the manuscript, and when he finished translation of a chapter, he marked a circle on the chapter name. The transfusion chapter had a circle. That dates the earliest writing on transfusion in Japanese to 1804, shortly after the death of Kogyu. Unfortunately, the manuscript translation no longer exists. In 1814, Shunzo Yoshio, grandson of Kogyu, and in 1820, Tokki Koshimura, translated the figure legends of Chirurgie. Soon afterwards, after the first report of transfusion from human-to-human by James Blundell in London in 1818, Western medical books published on the subject began to arrive. The works of Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, Georg Friedrich Most and Carl Canstatt all mentioning transfusion, albeit without details, were translated by Koan Ogata and Shinryo Tsuboi. During the Edo period, Japan was a closed country; only open to the Dutch through a tiny island in Nagasaki. But Japanese doctors in the Edo period learned about blood transfusion through Dutch-translated versions of Western medical Books. Transfusion began being practiced in Japan in 1919, almost exactly 100 years after the concept was introduced. PMID: 27149781 [Indexed for MEDLINE]