Virtuous Healing: Therapeutic Knowledge in Women’s Educational Literature in Early Modern Japan

EALC Lecture Series

During the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), didactic literature for women increasingly featured an impressive amount of medical know-how. Largely overlooked within the history of medicine, educational texts aimed at a female readership, such as Onna daigaku (The greater learning for women, 1716), in fact represent some of the most voluminous collections of therapeutic knowledge in early modern vernacular print. This presentation explores how these texts attempted to fashion readers into capable caregivers by strategically providing formulas from erudite medical treatises alongside simple remedies prepared with everyday ingredients found in and around the home. Just as importantly, moral guidebooks, exemplary literature, and educational compendia in this period also contributed to fashioning a new aspect of feminine virtue that imagined women as skilled and resourceful healers.

Speaker Bio:

W. Evan Young is a historian of Japan who specializes in medicine and science. As an assistant professor at Dickinson College, he teaches courses on the history of East Asia, the history of illness and therapy, and the history of gender and sexuality. His first book project, Family at the Bedside: Illness, Healing, and Knowledge in Early Modern Japan, explores how families dealt with ailments in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. His second major research project traces the history of medical knowledge in popular print, especially women’s magazines, from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century.