Early Japanese medicine has not much to distinguish it from the Chinese.  At first purely theurgic, the practice was later characterized by acupuncture and a refined study of the pulse.  It has an extensive literature, largely based upon the Chinese, and extending as far back as the beginning of the Christian era.  European medicine was introduced by the Portuguese and the Dutch, whose “factory” or “company” physicians were not without influence upon practice.  An extraordinary stimulus was given to the belief in European medicine by a dissection made by Mayeno in 1771 demonstrating the position of the organs as shown in the European anatomical tables, and proving the Chinese figures to be incorrect.  The next day a translation into Japanese of the anatomical work of Kulmus was begun, and from its appearance in 1773 may be dated the commencement of reforms in medicine.  In 1793, the work of de Gorter on internal medicine was translated, and it is interesting to know that before the so-called “opening of Japan” many European works on medicine had been published.  In 1857, a Dutch medical school was started in Yedo.  Since the political upheaval in 1868, Japan has made rapid progress in scientific medicine, and its institutions and teachers are now among the best known in the world.(28)

     (28) See Y. Fujikawa, Geschichte der Medizin in Japan,
     Tokyo, 1911.

CHAPTER II —­ GREEK MEDICINE

OGRAIAE gentis decus! let us sing with Lucretius, one of the great interpreters of Greek thought.  How grand and how true is his paean!

     Out of the night, out of the blinding night
     Thy beacon flashes;—­hail, beloved light
     Of Greece and Grecian; hail, for in the mirk
     Thou cost reveal each valley and each height.

     Thou art my leader, and the footprints shine,
     Wherein I plant my own....

* * * * *

     The world was shine to read, and having read,
     Before thy children’s eyes thou didst outspread
     The fruitful page of knowledge, all the wealth
     Of wisdom, all her plenty for their bread.

     (Bk.  III.—­Translated by D. A. Slater.)

Let us come out of the murky night of the East, heavy with phantoms, into the bright daylight of the West, into the company of men whose thoughts made our thoughts, and whose ways made our ways—­the men who first dared to look on nature with the clear eyes of the mind.

Browning’s famous poem, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” is an allegory of the pilgrimage of man through the dark places of the earth, on a dismal path beset with demons, and strewn with the wreckage of generations of failures.  In his ear tolled the knell of all the lost adventurers, his peers, all lost, lost within sight of the dark Tower itself—­

     The round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart,
     Built of brown stone, without a counterpart
     In the whole world.