Overview

Mapping Medical Modernity explores the history of medical modernization and public health in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tokyo, a city undergoing rapid transformation from the seat of power of the Tokugawa shoguns of the Edo period to the capital of a modern nation-state and its expanding empire in the Meiji period. Tracing the development of institutions and policies designed to improve medical care and public health in a dense urban environment, Susan L. Burns examines tensions between the involved parties—including doctors and policymakers, police and civil officials, residents and those who governed them—and provides case studies focused on three of the city’s major challenges in public health: syphilis, cholera, and mental illness. Drawing upon a wide range of archival materials and contemporary accounts, Burns also employs geographic information system analysis in mapping the complicated relationships interlinking aspects of the urban environment, social life, public policy, and commercialized medical culture to demonstrate visually how policy decisions and medical capitalism gradually reshaped existing spatial arrangements in the city as well as the social relations that unfolded within them.

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9780822948889

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Reviews

This marvelous book reconstructs the medical world of turn-of-the-century Tokyo. Susan L. Burns deftly balances attention to individual experiences of health and disease with comprehensive overviews of state policy and professional formation at a crucial moment in the making of the modern world. This book is indispensable for anyone concerned with the history and politics of Tokyo and urban public health.--Mary Augusta Brazelton, University of Cambridge

Author Information

Susan L. Burns is professor of Japanese History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Burns received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1994 and after teaching at the University of Texas, she returned to the University of Chicago in 2002 as an associate professor of History. In addition to numerous articles, Burns is the author of Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan and Kingdom of the Sick: A History of Leprosy and Japan, and co-editor of Gender and Law in the Japanese Imperium.

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