Mapping Medical Modernity

Urban Space and Public Health in Tokyo, 1868–1920

Susan L. Burns

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2026
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822992370
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: History

Mapping Medical Modernity explores the history of medical modernization and public health in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tokyo, a city undergoing rapid transformation from the seat of power of the Tokugawa shoguns of the Edo period to the capital of a modern nation-state and its expanding empire in the Meiji period. Tracing the development of institutions and policies designed to improve medical care and public health in a dense urban environment, Susan L. Burns examines tensions between the involved parties—including doctors and policymakers, police and civil officials, residents and those who governed them—and provides case studies focused on three of the city's major challenges in public health: syphilis, cholera, and mental illness. Drawing upon a wide range of archival materials and contemporary accounts, Burns also employs geographic information system analysis in mapping the complicated relationships interlinking aspects of the urban environment, social life, public policy, and commercialized medical culture to demonstrate visually how policy decisions and medical capitalism gradually reshaped existing spatial arrangements in the city as well as the social relations that unfolded within them.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction:Medical Modernization and the Healthscaping of Tokyo
• 1 Medical Edo:The Healthscape of the Early Modern Metropolis
• 2 The Medical Policy of 1874:Public Health, State-Building, and Tokyo
• 3 Creating the Infrastructure of Medical Modernization:Doctors and Hospitals in Tokyo
• 4 Sex(ually Transmitted Diseases) and the City:Syphilis and the Healthscape
• 5 Psychiatric Care in Tokyo:Class and Social Order
• 6 Cholera in Tokyo:Waste, Water, and Poverty
• Conclusion:Medical Modernity and Its Contradictions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover