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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Kasahara's Vaccination Tools and Containers

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Glass Plates and the Transfer From Nagasaki to Fukui Both before and after the vaccine's successful importation to Japan, physicians pondered the best way of transporting it over long distances. Kasahara Hakuō, town doctor in Fukui domain, developed a special glass container to facilitate importation of the vaccine from abroad. Perhaps he had been influenced by European precedents; in 1803, for example, a Spanish physician proposed similar glass containers for overseas transports [Martha Few, "Circulating Smallpox Knowledge," p. 534]. In both 1847 and 1848, Hakuō petitioned the shogunate through the lord of his domain for permission to bring the vaccine to Japan. But unlike his colleague Narabayashi Sōken in Saga, who was working with the Dutch trading company, he decided to request an import from China. The distance from the Chinese coast was much shorter than from Batavia, and smallpox vaccinations were already well established in some Chinese coastal cities, where they coexisted with variolation. But Hakuō's plan became moot when in 1849, Narabayashi Sōken received a viable shipment of scabs from the Dutch, shortly before the Chinese delivery was expected to arrive.

Upon learning that the vaccine had arrived in Nagasaki, Hakuō immediately left Fukui to travel to western Japan. But by the time he reached Kyoto, he found that his teacher Hino Teisai had already received a shipment of bottled scabs from Egawa Shirōhachi, an interpreter in Nagasaki who was involved in Hakuō’s plan and had obtained vaccines originating from the Batavia transmission. Using one of these scabs, Hino Teisai had vaccinated several children in Kyoto. Hakuō thus stayed in Kyoto for about two months and helped Teisai set up his vaccination clinic. In the 11th month he finally prepared for the transfer to Fukui.

Only one of eight scabs Teisai had received from Shirōhachi had been viable. To improve the chances of success, Hakuō thus decided to use two vehicles at once: his self-designed glass container, and children's bodies as a back-up.
Kasahara Hakuō had developed the glass container together with Kiriyama Genchū, a fellow pupil of Hino Teisai's, specifically for the planned importation from China. In a document attached to one of his petitions to the lord of Fukui, he described how to extract the lymph from a ripe pock using a lancet, place the lymph into an molded glass plate, cover it with a matching flat glass plate, label it, and fasten the two plates with a piece of silk thread. He recommended carrying the container inside one's clothing to keep it warm. His proposal recommended that the authorities should have six or seven sets of these containers manufactured in one of Japan's large cities because Hakuō had heard that glass production was not very advanced in the Qing empire [Fukui-ken igakushi, p. 171-175]. It is unknown whether such containers were eventually sent to China by the governor of Nagasaki, but Hakuō used them to bring the vaccine from Kyoto to Fukui early in the winter of 1849.

To read about Hakuō's sharing of the vaccine with physicians in Osaka while in Kyoto, click here. To read more about vehicles and the transfer to Fukui, stay on this pathway.
From Kyoto to Fukui
The first vehicle was a special container he had himself developed: two matching rectangular plates of curved glass that could hold the pus between them. Second, he recruited two pairs of parents with young children for arm-to-arm transfers.
On 11/16, Hakuō began the transfer from Kyoto to Fukui by vaccinating two children from Kyoto. After confirming the development of pustules on their arms, he traveled with the children and their parents to an inn in Nagahama on Lake Biwa--an important way station on the way to Fukui. On 11/22 the children's pustules had ripened, and Hakuō extracted lymph from their arms and transferred it to two children from Fukui, who had traveled to Kyoto for this purpose with their parents. The family from Kyoto then returned home, whereas Hakuō and the second family hiked back to Fukui, making a legendary journey across Tochigi Pass in the middle of a snowstorm [Senkyōroku]. On 11/24, the party reached the highway station of Imajō, where a physician from Fuchū was already waiting with three local children in tow. Hakuō vaccinated one of these children as a back-up. On 11/25, the travelers arrived in the castle town of Fukui, and Hakuō vaccinated further children. He probably used the lymph from the glass container for this as the bodies of the arriving children would not yet have been ready for extraction [Sugihara].

Although arm-to-arm transfer turned out to be unnecessary in this case, it subsequently became the preferred method of transmission, due to its reliability. The author of "Gyūtō Kaihei" (Uncovering Cowpox) from 1852 argued that scabs should only be used in rare cases, for example for long-distance transfers, because they were more likely to result in "false" pocks and did not offer the same degree of protection as direct transmission [Umihara 2014, p. 196].