Kaitai Shinsho (1774): How a Dutch Anatomy Book Came Into Japanese

Kaitai shinsho, volume 1: the title page. National Library of Medicine.

In 1771 a group of Japanese physicians took a Dutch anatomy book with them to the dissection of an executed criminal's body. Comparing the book with what they saw, they were struck by how accurate it was, and decided to put it into Japanese. The translation, published in Edo in 1774 as Kaitai shinsho ("New Book of Anatomy"), is considered the first Western book published in Japan in the Japanese language, and a large step in bringing European medicine there.

The book behind it

The original was the work of Johann Adam Kulmus, born in Danzig in 1689. He studied medicine at Halle, Strasbourg and Basel, became a lecturer in medicine at the Gymnasium in Danzig in 1725, and died there in 1745. His best-known work, the anatomical textbook Anatomische Tabellen, first appeared in Danzig in 1722. It was extremely popular and was translated into Latin, French, Dutch and, in the end, Japanese. Most of its pictures copy those in Philippe Verheyen's Corporis humani anatomia, which in turn lean heavily on Vesalius.

Translating anatomy into Japanese

By 1770 Japan had been closed to the rest of the world for well over a century, apart from limited trade with the Netherlands and China. About then, a group of physicians led by Maeno Ryōtaku (1733–1803) and Sugita Genpaku (1733–1817) took up the study of Dutch medicine, and in 1771 obtained copies of Kulmus's book in its Dutch translation, Ontleedkundige tafelen, published in Amsterdam in 1734.

It was that copy they carried to the dissection. Turning it into Japanese took years, because many of the body's parts had no Japanese names yet, and the translators had to find a new vocabulary for them.

The skull seen from the side and from above, and two cross sections of the brain. National Library of Medicine.

The book mattered beyond its text. It called into question the Chinese anatomical theories on which Japan's traditional kampō medicine rested, and it helped European medicine take hold in the country.

The pictures

Most of the woodcuts are copied from Kulmus, but not all. The opening picture, with Adam and Eve, comes from the title page of Juan Valverde de Amusco's Vivae imagines partium corporis humani, printed by Christopher Plantin in Antwerp in 1572. The last four, showing the tendons of the hands and feet, come from Govard Bidloo's anatomy, published in Amsterdam in 1690.

The frontispiece after Valverde, with Adam and Eve, and the first page of the text. National Library of Medicine.

The windpipe and lungs, and details of the heart. National Library of Medicine.

The female reproductive organs, and a fully formed fetus with its cord and placenta. National Library of Medicine.

The muscles and tendons of a flayed left hand, one of the four plates taken from Bidloo. National Library of Medicine.

Sources

• National Library of Medicine, Historical Anatomies on the Web, "Johann Adam Kulmus: Kaitai shinsho"; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Plates photographed by the library from its copy of Kaitai shinsho (Edo: Suharaya Ichibē, 1774).
• Further reading named by the library: John Z. Bowers, Western Medical Pioneers in Feudal Japan (Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), pp. 67–72; L. Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration, trans. Mortimer Frank (Hafner, 1962), p. 34.