ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to combine historiographies of environment, contagionism, and consumeristic prophylaxes to describe a picture in which natural and man-made circumstances, politics, and economy together formulated Japan's experience of diseases. It highlights the role played by the complex geography of the area of Tokyo and the history of civic engineering and the segregation of residences of different classes. As for human understanding and reactions to the disease, the chapter emphasizes the role of market and consumerism in the making of public health in modern Japan, rather than the political and administrative enforcement of isolation and segregation. It presents a topographical analysis of cholera epidemics in Tokyo. The chapter offers an overview of issues related to the isolation of patients of cholera. It also discusses the role of consumer behaviour in the making of public health in Japan through episodes taken from the epidemics of cholera in Tokyo in the late nineteenth century.
