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

Sharing Among Physicians of Dutch Learning

Kasahara Ryōsaku was limited in his ability to share the vaccine by his role as an envoy of the domain. Although he was a town doctor by status, he had been ordered and funded to obtain the vaccine by the domain, and thus had to fulfill the domain's needs by bringing the vaccine to Fukui. At the same time, Kasahara was also indebted to his professional network of physicians of Dutch medicine, which included his teacher Hino Teisai and Hino's other pupils. These physicians eagerly awaited transfers and Kasahara was aware of the importance of this network for his own work. In his 1848 proposal for importation of the vaccine from China, he proposed distributing the vaccine to physicians along the way from Nagasaki to Fukui to be prepared for the event of a sudden disruption [Fukui-ken igakushi, p. 175]. Rather than prioritizing the domain's territorial claim and rejecting his colleagues' requests, he emphasized that some sharing with knowledgeable people in other territories was in fact in the domain's best interest.

On 11/1, 1849 (lunar calendar), while Kasahara was still in Kyoto, three physicians including Hino Teisai's younger brother Katsumin visited from Osaka and Sakai and asked Kasahara for a transmission. Kasahara accepted their request after some hesitation. In a written statement addressed to the two men from Osaka, he stressed that he had not yet completed his mission of bringing the vaccine to Fukui, hinting that he considered any distraction from that mission as potentially problematic. Yet, he added that he had decided to approve this transmission because he had been ordered to establish a vaccination clinic in Kyoto to serve as a resupplier for Fukui, and that the same logic might be applied to Osaka [Senkyōroku, p. 5, 6].

Upon transmission, Kasahara issued a certificate that specified the purpose of the Osaka transfer as "multiplication" (hanshoku no tame). On 11/7, Osaka's first vaccination clinic opened in the neighborhood of Furutemachi with a formal ceremony, with Kasahara Ryōsaku and Hino Teisai in attendance. Bound by his loyalty to his domain and his loyalty to the more far-flung network of fellow professionals, Kasahara connected the two by emphasizing the spatial requirements of vaccine preservation.

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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 Ryōsaku, town doctor in Fukui domain, developed a special glass container to facilitate importation of the vaccine from abroad. He probably had been influenced by European precedents; in 1799, Edward Jenner described how the dried-up lymph could be preserved between two glass plates (as an alternative to transport via threads soaked in cowpox lymph), and a Spanish physician proposed similar containers for overseas transports in 1803 [Rusnock 2009, p. 23-25; Martha Few, "Circulating Smallpox Knowledge," p. 534]. In both 1847 and 1848, Ryōsaku 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 Ryōsaku'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, Kasahara 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 Kasahara’s plan and had obtained vaccines originating from the Batavia transmission. Using one of these scabs, Hino Teisai had vaccinated several children in Kyoto. Kasahara 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 Hino had received from Egawa had been viable. To improve the chances of success, Kasahara thus decided to use two vehicles at once: his self-designed glass container, and children's bodies as a back-up.
Kasahara Ryōsaku 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 Kasahara 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 Kasahara used them to bring the vaccine from Kyoto to Fukui early in the winter of 1849.
Read about Kasahara's sharing of vaccines with physicians in Osaka while in Kyoto. Or continue on this pathway to read more about vehicles and the transfer to Fukui.

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Osaka Transmission Certificate