A Tale of Clean Revolution: Semmelweis and the Dawn of the Japanese Medical System (Mid-19th Century to Meiji Era)

A Tale of Clean Revolution: Semmelweis and the Dawn of the Japanese Medical System (Mid-19th Century to Meiji Era)

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Viennese obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis was confronted with a puzzling phenomenon. In maternity wards attended by medical students, the rate of maternal mortality was much higher than in wards where only midwives were in charge. The cause of the deaths was not known at the time, although it was feared that postpartum fever, which develops after childbirth, was one of the causes of death.

In his search for the cause, Semmelweis noticed that medical students attended births without washing their hands after autopsies. When he mandated hand washing with chlorinated water, the mortality rate dropped dramatically. His findings were greeted with scorn and rejection by his peers and superiors. The medical community at the time did not yet understand the invisible presence of pathogens, and the idea that physicians could be a source of infection was perceived as a challenge to authority.

Semmelweis became isolated and mentally ill, and ended his life in an asylum. His intuition went unnoticed until Pasteur and Koch established bacteriology.

Meanwhile, in Japan, scientific knowledge became common knowledge in the latter half of the 19th century, but it was met with fierce resistance and ordeals. While smallpox was raging in Japan, Ogata Koan, a Dutch physician, tried to spread cowpox vaccination, but he was stymied by superstition that inoculating people with cow disease would be an impious act that would result in Buddha's damnation. He inoculated his own children with cowpox, thus relieving the people's fears not through words but through demonstration.

In the Meiji period (1868-1912), Kanehiro Takagi, the Navy Surgeon General, introduced barley rice, which he believed was caused by a diet centered on white rice, and dramatically reduced the number of deaths due to beriberi. However, the effect was silenced by scholars in the army who were bound by tradition. The structure of authority taking precedence over science was also evident here.

In modern Japan, the very concept of hygiene was imported. Even the introduction of sewage systems and infection control measures by Shinpeira Goto was opposed in rural areas on the grounds that flushing latrines would result in the loss of fertilizer. There are countless examples of the clash between culture and science, such as bathing customs and the reuse of feces and urine.

Semmelweis's chlorinated water, Hungarian vaccination, Takagi's barley rice - these were the spearheads of the revolution in the name of sanitation. Science is not merely the accumulation of reason. It is not a mere accumulation of reason, but a process of questioning common sense, of acknowledging fallacies, and of transcending people's fears and cultural barriers to take root in society.

It is on the basis of these quiet victories, built at the end of unacknowledged struggles and sacrifices, that we can now take it for granted that we wash our hands of it.