Hardcover: 432 pages

Publisher: Harvard University Asia Center (March 1996)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0674579127

ISBN-13: 978-0674579125

Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.6 inches

Review

Expertly utilizing a wide variety of journals, statistics, and literary works, Johnston describes the tuberculosis epidemic in Japan in all its facets--social, economic, political, and cultural. The result is the most thorough and fascinating account of a modern epidemic in Japan currently available in English.

--W. Wayne Farris (Technology and Culture )

In Japan, the near panic associated for a half-century with this untreatable disease cast a dreadful shadow on any family affected by it. As a result, no accurate statistics could be kept. Families would deny its existence among their ranks, past or present, and physicians avoided making the diagnosis for fear of being blackballed in the community...William Johnston has used reports from medical journals and archeologic and ethnologic evidence. His most innovative sources are a host of contemporaneous novels. These provide word pictures of the problems of ordinary citizens coping with life with the fear engendered by a mysterious disease that took its toll in a large proportion of families and seemed to spread by magic. (New England Journal of Medicine )

The book... is a substantial and well-written study of a disease that was not only a major killer in the first half of this century, but also a major social and economic problem that broke families apart and eroded the work force. The author is to be highly commended for this instructive, thorough, and at times thought-provoking study, which is a significant addition to the meager literature available in English on the medical history of Japan. Its appeal should extend to students in the fields of medical history, social and cultural history, the history of public health, and even literary history...Johnston has done pioneering work in sketching the broad picture.

--Edwina Palmer and Geoffrey Rice (Journal of Japanese Studies )