Nagata Tokuhon

Nagata Tokuhon (from: Isei Nagata Tokuhon-den , 1900)

Contents of the 'Nineteen Recipes of the Venerable Tokuhon' ( Tokuhon-ō jūkyū hō ).

Nagata Tokuhon ( Japanese 永田 徳 本 ; * 1513 in Ōhama , Hekikai-gun , Mikawa Province (now Hekinan , Aichi Prefecture ); † 1630 in Higashihori, Suwa-gun , Shinano Province (now Nagano Prefecture )) was a Japanese doctor who exercised a lasting influence on the development of medicine in Japan in the Age of the Warring States ( Sengoku-jidai ) and, along with Manase Dōsan and Tashiro Sanki, is one of the "three venerable doctors" ( 三聖 , sansei ) in the upheaval of early modernism .

Life

Nagata Tokuhon came from the small town of Ōhama in today's Hekinan. As a young man he first went to Kajima ( 鹿島 ) in Hitachi Province (now Ibaraki Prefecture ) and studied breathing ( 神仙 吐納 , Shinsen tonō ) under the guidance of the Zen monk Zanmu ( 残夢 , † 1576 ). This was followed by further medical studies with the famous Gekkō Dōjin ( 月 湖 道人 ) and in Koga with Tashiro Sanki. In 1541 he moved to the village of Higashihori ( 東 堀 村 , Higashihori-mura ) in the Suwa District in Shinano Province (now Nagano Prefecture ), where he married. In 1582 he made contact with Manase Dōsan. In 1625 he cured the second Shogun of the Tokugawa dynasty Hidetada from a serious illness. In 1630 he died very old in the village of Higashihori.

Medical work and teaching

According to tradition, Nagata Tokuhon roamed the country with a cow with bags of various medicines dangling around its neck, which he sold at an extremely low unit price. This also applied to the Shogun Hidetada. The poor were treated for free.

Nagata trained around fifty students. He broke away from the Chinese teachings and regrouped the ailments based on symptoms. Although he chose more aggressive methods than was common at the time with a number of laxatives, his therapies aimed to support the forces of nature ( ryōnō , 良能 ), with the patient's consent and support playing a crucial role.

Among his writings, the "Nineteen Recipes of the Venerable Tokuhon" ( 徳 本 翁 十九 方 , Tokuhon-ō jūkyū hō ) were widely used. In the “Discourse on Medicine” ( 医 之 弁 , I-no-ben , 1585) he showed contemporary doctors that the Chinese work Shānghán lùn (“Treatise on Cold Diseases”) with its pathology and the equally useful therapeutic methods offered a worth considering alternative to Manase Dōsan's teachings. This approach was taken up and further developed in the "old school" ( ko-ihō-ha , 古 医 方 派 ) of the Edo period .

Remarks

1. ↑ 碧南 の 偉人 そ の ２ . (No longer available online.) City of Hekinan, archived from the original on February 3, 2015 ; Retrieved December 4, 2011 (Japanese). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Expelling the bad '' Qi '' (Japanese ki ) of the abdomen in the manner of mountain ascetics ( shinsen ).
3. ↑ Komatsu (1900)
4. ↑ Komatsu (1900)
5. ↑ See the western concept of the vis medicatrix naturae .
6. ↑ Image file of the edition by Inaba Fuminori and Wakuda Yoshitora on the website of the Waseda University Library
7. ↑ Rosner (1989), p. 48f.

literature

• Komatsu Kiyokago: Isei Nagata Tokuhon den . Tokyo: Kyōeidō, 1900.
• Yū Fujikawa: The Doctor in Japanese Culture . Tokyo: Imperial Japanese Ministry of Education, 1911, p. 33.
• Erhard Rosner: Medical history of Japan . (Handbook of Oriental Studies, Fifth Section). Leiden: Brill, 1989.

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . So Nagata is the family name, Tokuhon the first name.