"In Japan, as late as the mid-nineteenth century, smallpox claimed the lives of an estimated 20 percent of all children born - most of them before the age of five. When the apathetic Tokugawa shogunate failed to respond to this health crisis, Japanese physicians, learned in West…
"In Japan, as late as the mid-nineteenth century, smallpox claimed the lives of an estimated 20 percent of all children born - most of them before the age of five. When the apathetic Tokugawa shogunate failed to respond to this health crisis, Japanese physicians, learned in West…
By the mid-19th century, when Japan was still largely closed to the West, smallpox epidemics had killed an estimated ten percent of the Japanese population. This text details the appalling cost of Japan's almost 300 year isolation and examines in depth a nation on the cusp of po…