ABSTRACT
In 1900 medicine was by far the strongest field among Japanese technical research specialties. Though rarely the preferred undergraduate or graduate major, it enjoyed a number of assets not possessed by any other discipline: leadership, money, access to the powerful, and major discoveries. Some of this was owing to Shibasaburo Kitasato (1852-1931), codiscoverer of natural immunity, the plague
bacillus, and tetanus antitoxin, who in 1892 returned to Japan after seven years of research in Germany to found the Institute of Infectious Diseases. Both a distinguished researcher and a political infighter of unusual skill, Kitasato joined forces with sympathetic officials and physician members of parliament to create and sustain a laboratory which, over the next twenty years, evolved into one of the world's three leading centers of non-academic medical research.l Some of medicine's prestige also reflected its relatively strong presence at the Institute's major rival, Tokyo University. Deriving in part from an eighteenth century medical academy, Tokyo's modern Faculty of Medicine had by 1902 entirely replaced German guest professors with Japanese academics and had begun contributing to medical knowledge. It had no achievements quite so grand as those of Kitasato, but important contributions would come during World War I.
