Background

Hideyo Noguchi was born on 9 November 1876, in the mountain village of Inawashiro, Fukushima, Japan. As a boy, he went by the name Yoisaku. Given the childhood name Seisaku, he was the second child and only son of Sayosuke, a peasant farmer who soon deserted the family; his mother, Shika, worked in the rice fields to support her household.

Education

When very young, Noguchi fell into an open hearth fire and was severely burned, losing the use of his left fingers. He nevertheless excelled in school, and he was noticed by the superintendent, Sokae Kobayashi, who became something of a foster father to him, coordinating financial support and overseeing the rest of his education.

Kobayashi arranged for a surgeon to restore some functioning to the child’s crippled hand, and it was as a result of his experience that Noguchi decided to study medicine. The surgeon retained him as an apprentice; in his office Noguchi used a microscope and first encountered spirochetes—microbes that would become a major focus of his research. In 1894 Noguchi entered the Tokyo Medical College (now Tokyo Medical University), and in 1897 he passed the government examinations for a medical degree.

He received honorary degrees from many universities.

Career

Noguchi served as a lecturer at a dental college and studied the bubonic plague briefly in China before accepting a position as an assistant under bacteriologist Shibasaburo Kitasato at his Institute for Infectious Diseases. About this time, Noguchi changed his first name to Hideyo, meaning “great man of the world.”

In 1899 a medical commission was sent from the United States to study tropical diseases afflicting American soldiers stationed in the Philippines. Flexner, who was a leading bacteriologist from Johns Hopkins University, was a member of this commission; he was with the group when it passed through Japan and visited Kitasato’s Institute for Infectious Diseases. Noguchi met Flexner there, he told Noguchi he would be moving to the University of Pennsylvania and gave him his address there.

Later, about six months after he had met Flexner, Noguchi simply arrived at the University of Pennsylvania. He travelled on borrowed money and, as Flexner remembers, “presented himself at the dormitories unexpectedly, and in accordance with eastern custom bearing several gifts, which the writer still possesses and cherishes.” Flexner arranged for him to be appointed as a research assistant to Silas Weir Mitchell, with whom he studied the hemolysins and agglutinins of snake venoms and the protective sera against them. The work he did with Mitchell won Noguchi a year-long Carnegie fellowship at the Statens Seruminstitut in Copenhagen. Here, under Thorvald Madsen, he mastered certain quantitative and chemical methods that were related to his snake venom studies.

Flexner became the organizing director of the Rockefeller Institute in New York City when it opened in 1904, and he immediately asked Noguchi to work in his laboratory on poliomyelitis. In 1905 the two men were the first scientists in the United States to confirm Fritz Schaudinn’s identification of Treponema pallidum (T. pallidum) as the spirochete responsible for syphilis. Noguchi’s research on syphilis continued for a number of years, and the energy he devoted to this resulted in a major breakthrough. Syphilis patients had long been observed to suffer from paresis, a kind of partial paralysis. The connection had long been assumed but never proven until 1913, when Noguchi found a spiral organism in the brains of patients who had died of paresis. His work proved that general paresis and tabes dorsalis are the late stages of tertiary syphilis in the brain and spinal cord. He made the discovery early one morning, after spending the entire night inspecting two hundred slides from paretic brain specimens.

Despite this success, Noguchi’s research during this period also resulted in some notorious failures. In 1911 he claimed he had obtained T. pallidum in pure culture, but no other investigator has ever duplicated his results, and the organisms have never been successfully isolated. He also developed a single diagnostic test for syphilis, which involved the injection of T. pallidum into the skin of patients believed to be suffering from the disease. The skin test proved unreliable, and according to Paul Franklin Clark in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine even a researcher who worked with Noguchi on this project was unable to duplicate his results in a different laboratory. In another study, Noguchi and Flexner reported that they had cultivated the “globoid bodies” of the virus that produces polio in monkeys, but this finding was later discredited as well, though their mistake may have been the result of the generally imperfect understanding at the time of the difference between bacteria and viruses.

In 1918 Noguchi turned to experiments on the etiology of obscure infectious diseases. Each required a different method of approach, and he made field expeditions to the American West as well as Central and South America. In the Peruvian Andes, he worked on Carrion’s disease, now called Bartonellosis, and he established the existence of two different manifestations of the disease which had the same etiology. In one disease, there is an acute febrile anemia (Oroya fever), and in the other a local cutaneous eruption (Verruga peruana).

Noguchi also did invaluable work in trachoma, a disease of the eyes. He attributed its cause to a bacterium; his findings were later challenged and the cause identified as a virus, but today the causative organism of trachoma is considered a unique microbe which is more closely related to bacteria than to viruses. Despite this controversy, Noguchi’s critical work on trachoma’s secondary bacterial infection contributed to its cure. During this period, he also searched for the causes of rabies and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

The most controversial work that Noguchi did was on yellow fever. Using evidence he had gathered during four expeditions to the southern hemisphere, Noguchi became convinced that yellow fever was caused by a spiral organism which he had isolated. He named it Leptospira icteroides, and he published several reports based on these field observations. He even prepared an experimental vaccine against the disease that was distributed by the Rockefeller Institute. Noguchi’s research, however, was almost totally invalid. The evidence he had been examining had been taken from patients who had been misdiagnosed by local physicians; instead of suffering from yellow fever, they had hemorrhagic jaundice, also known as Weil’s disease or leptospirosis. In addition, Noguchi had assumed without conducting sufficient research that the spirochete which caused leptospirosis differed from the one he believed caused yellow fever. By 1924 other researchers had showed that the two spirochetes were identical.

In 1927 Adrian Stokes determined that a filterable virus was the cause of yellow fever. Stokes made this discovery in African patients from whom no Leptospira could be recovered, but he died from yellow fever before his report was published. In October of that year, Noguchi sailed for Africa to compare yellow fever there with that of South America. He wanted to test Stokes’s findings for himself, and he worked for six strenuous, hectic months in a crude field laboratory with William Young, the resident British director of the Medical Research Institute.

Noguchi was stricken with yellow fever just as he was about to return to New York. He died at the age of fifty-one. Young confirmed the diagnosis of yellow fever during an autopsy and then succumbed to the disease himself a week later.

Achievements

• 

  Because of his important contributions and great devotion to medical research, he is internationally renowned as one of the greatest figures of modern Japanese science. In 1911 Noguchi succeeded in producing a pure culture of Spirochaeta pallida. He made another important contribution by proving that progressive paresis and tabes dorsalis were caused by the syphillis spirochaete. He also published researches on the causes of infantile paralysis, rabies, and trachoma.
  
  For indefatigable research into infectious diseases, Noguchi was decorated by many foreign governments. He received the Order of Dannebrog in 1913. He also became the Commander of the Order of Isabella the Catholic in 1913, as well as the Commander of the Order of the Polar Star next year.
  
  In 1915 he returned to Japan to receive the Order of the Rising Sun and an Imperial Award from Imperial Academy. He received the John Scott Medal in 1920 and was the first recipient of the Kober Medal in 1925. Noguchi earned the National Order of the Legion of Honour of France in 1924.
  
  He is remembered in Japan as well, where, among many memorials, his portrait was issued on a postage stamp in 1950. Noguchi’s family home is now a museum where many of his papers and memorabilia are preserved.
  
  The Japanese Government established the Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize in July 2006 as a new international medical research and services award to mark the official visit by Prime Minister Jun'ichirō Koizumi to Africa in May 2006 and the 80th anniversary of Noguchi’s death.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Serum Diagnosis of Syphilis and the Butyric Acid Test for Syphilis (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Serum Diagnosis of Syphilis and the Butyric ...)

    1910
  • Snake Venoms: An Investigation of Venomous Snakes, With Special Reference to the Phenomena of Their Venoms (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Snake Venoms: An Investigation of Venomous S...)

    1909
  • A Biochemical Study Of The Phenomena Known As Complement Splitting

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • The Etiology of Trachoma: Journal of Experimental Medicine, V48, No. 2, Supplement 2

Connections

On April 10, 1912, Noguchi married Mary Dardis. She was the daughter of Irish immigrants from Scranton, Pennsylvania, where her three brothers worked as coal miners. Noguchi was initially very secretive about his wife, even with his closest colleagues, and this may have been because of the interracial nature of his marriage. They had no children.

Father:

Sayosuke Noguchi

He was a peasant farmer.

Mother:

Shika Noguchi

She worked as a rice field laborer.

Wife:

Mary Dardis

References

• Noguchi This is the biography of Hideyo Noguchi also known as Seisaku Noguchi, who was a prominent Japanese bacteriologist who in 1911 discovered the agent of syphilis as the cause of progressive paralytic disease.
• Taller Than Bandai Mountain: The Story of Hideyo Noguchi
  1968
• From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Hideyo Noguchi Lecture) During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a radical change occurred in the patterns and framework of European thought. In the wake of Copernican theory and discoveries through the telescope, the notion of an ordered cosmos of "fixed stars" gave way to that of a universe infinite in both time and space-with significant and far-reaching consequences for human thought. Alexandre Koyré brilliantly interprets this revolution in terms of the change that occurred in our conception of the universe and our place in it, and illustrates the primacy of this change in the development of the modern world. "An important contribution to the problem of the transition from the world view characteristic of the medieval centuries to that which rapidly gained acceptance after the seventeenth century." (Philosophical Quarterly) "Koyré has provided the material and has illuminated it with uniformly perceptive and occasionally brilliant commentary.... An important contribution to the study of 17th-century thought." (Thomas S. Kuhn, Science) "A model of scholarliness without pedantry, of clarity without oversimplification." (Arthur Koestler, Encounter) "Surely a work that will be welcomed alike by the scientist, philosopher, and historian of ideas." (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research)
• The Chinese way in medicine, ([Publications of the Institute of the history of medicine, the Johns Hopkins university. 3d ser.: The Hideyo Noguchi lectures)
• Noguchi and His Patrons A comprehensive biography of the Japanese microbiologist Hideyo Noguchi. The story of his triumph and eclipse is both a work of scholarship and a psychological study of a man who, in his own person, embodied many of the ironies and conflicts of 20th-century science and society.
  1980
• The plague killers Dramatic history and science of early America, when the Rockefeller Foundation decided too many people were dying! of mysterious things! The International Health Commission researched hookworm, malaria, and yellow fever, to eradicate them in the US. Interviews with scientists and doctors. Nicely fat book of thrilling story.
  1969