Eastern and Western Medicine in the Jesuit Mission to Japan

• In Event: The Jesuits in Asia: Encounters between Eastern and Western Science

Abstract

From roughly 1556-1562, the Jesuit missionaries operated a hospital in the city of Funai, in southwestern Japan. Surprisingly, this hospital offered its patients two forms of medical treatment: European surgery techniques, offered by Brother Luis de Almeida (a former ship’s surgeon), and Chinese medicine, offered by a Japanese Christian baptized Paulo (a former Buddhist priest). This early conjunction of Eastern and Western medicine, under the auspices of the Church, merits attention. Neither the Japanese nor the Europeans seem to have clearly understood the philosophical implications of such a conjunction— the tensions between Galenic and Sino-Japanese theories of the body. Rather, the missionaries assumed that Chinese medicine was a form of pharmacology, and the Japanese assumed that European surgery was a form of ritualistic therapy. Nonetheless, the philosophical underpinnings had practical consequences in the way that the missionaries treated and handled the sick. These more concrete practices, in turn, provoked adverse reactions within the Funai community, and contributed to the hospital’s decline in the 1560’s, with an ultimate divorce between medicine and evangelism in the Japanese mission.

Author

• James Fujitani, Azusa Pacific University