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While Chōei never achieved financial security or fame during his lifetime, he was well known for translating Dutch medical texts to Japanese. Chōei was born into a middle ranking samurai family, but he ultimately rejected his samurai heritage to focus on his rangaku scholarship and medical practice. As a result, he struggled for money throughout his life. Chōei studied medicine with Phillip Franz van Siebold (1796-1866), a well-known European physician in Nagasaki. The Bakufu briefly allowed Japanese students to study medicine with Siebold, because they believed that Western medicine might be useful. Even before Chōei studied with Siebold, he could translate Dutch.

After the Siebold School was closed after a scandal involving its founder, Chōei slowly severed ties with his family and focused on his rangaku studies. It was Chōei’s translation work that interested Fukuda Sōtei, a prominent Kōzuke physician. Chōei adapted the Dutch medical texts to help Japanese physicians develop solutions for local problems. Chōei did not provide literal translations of the Dutch source materials; he interpreted the work to best serve the social needs of his physician audience. Sōtei was learning Dutch and he sought out Chōei for additional guidance because he saw the potential for practical applications of Western medicine. Sōtei and Chōei began a relationship that allowed Chōei to network with a number of rural physicians from Kōzuke. Nakamura believes that this interchange of ideas between urban and rural intellectuals created an impetus for social change in Japan that extended beyond the Tokugawa period.

Nakamura does an excellent job throughout this book demonstrating that social networks developed between local physicians and proponents of Western medicine. Nakamura’s underlying thesis in this work is that these social networks allowed for the “exchange of ideas between urban and rural intellectuals, and, eventually, for social change in the late Tokugawa period and beyond.” (p. 180.) Nakamura successfully demonstrates that these networks did exist, but she fails to show how extensive they truly were. At the end of the book, it is not clear whether or not the relationship between Chōei had with the Kōzuke physicians was a typical arrangement. Nakamura’s work would benefit from additional examples of consulting arrangements between proponents of Western medicine and Japanese physicians. Despite this minor complaint, Nakamura’s book does an excellent job elucidating the growing influence of Western medicine during the Tokugawa period.

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[[Category:Book Review]] [[Category:Historiography]] [[Category:Medical History]] [[Category:Japanese History]] [[Category:Asian History]]