Practices of Transferring German Medical Culture to Meiji Japan

Recent work on international scientific transfer has demonstrated that the attitude and motivation of the agents are crucial to the process of selective knowledge-transfer from one culture or country to another. The core of my research concerns how German medical culture was transferred to Japan by a group of future professors of medicine at Tokyo Imperial University, who had studied at German-language universities between 1868 and 1914. Drawing on different kinds of ego documents, including travel diaries and reports, autobiographies, letters written back home, yearly reports to the Japanese educational ministry, I will analyze the social and scientific practices involved in studying in foreign countries.

In this paper I look in particular at transferring practices of the Japanese psychiatrist and medical historian Kure Shūzō, in relating to the collective practices of the other agencies of my research. In my analyses of his transferring practices referring to the professionalizing of the western medical System in Japan, I will interpret his motivations and attitudes and interest toward selective transferring practices especially as they relate to the cultural context of Japanese modernization, international political relationships, and intercultural contact between East and West.