Fall 2026 Colloquium - Susan Burns

Professor, History, University of Chicago

Title: Becoming a Doctor in Early Nineteenth Century Japan: Medical Education on the Eve of Modernity

Abstract: In the 1870s, the recently established government of Japan began an aggressive campaign to institutionalize what was then known as “Western medicine.” This involved not only the establishment of modern medical schools (many staffed by European physicians) and the creation of a licensing system but also efforts to discredit Sino-Japanese medicine and its practitioners as backward and ineffective. In this talk, I want to explore the nature of medical knowledge before the intervention of the modern state by examining the education of a physician named Nanayama Jundō, who lived and worked in the far northwest of Japan. In his early 20 Nanayama traveled to Kyoto, the imperial capital and the epicenter of medical education, to study with some of the famous physicians of his day. His extant case notes, compiled at the suggestion of one of his teachers, offer a window into what he learned and how he made use of that knowledge.