The Languages of Medical Knowledge in Tokugawa Japan

Abstract

Detailed attention to the linguistic forms of medical writing can shed light on the social and cultural processes involved in the development of medical knowledge. This chapter analyzes the language of published Japanese medical treatises from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on the linguistic strategies by which medical writers made classical Chinese medical learning accessible to a Japanese audience and the ways they incorporated local medical learning from vernacular oral and written sources. Both these phenomena arose from Japanese doctors’ efforts to adapt Chinese medical learning to their own contexts of practice, but together they contributed to the formation of a distinctive body of medical literature whose character was quite different from that of the continent.