桂川 甫周
physician translator writer scholars
Hoshū Katsuragawa was born in 1751.His personal name was Kokuzui, his formal name Kokan, and his literary name Getchi. His family for generations served as physicians to the Tokugawa shogunate, Hoshü representing the fourth generation to hold such a position.
He was eighteen when he assumed the post of okui (physician) to the shogun. In 1771 he helped prepare a translation of a Dutch work on dissection, being the youngest member of the group of translators.
In 1772 he was ordered by the shogunate to confer with the head of the Dutch trading office in Nagasaki on the occasion of the latter’s visit to Edo. In 1776 he had occasion to meet the Swedish physician Karl Peter Thunberg, who was attached to the Dutch trading office, received medical instruction from him, and was given a certificate to that effect. In 1788 he was awarded the highest rank of physician, hogen, and in 1794 was appointed professor of surgery in the Igakkan, the medical school maintained in Edo under the auspices of the shogunate.
In addition to his medical interests, he was active as a writer and translator. Gathering information from Daikokuya Kôdayü, a Japanese seaman who was shipwrecked and detained in Russia for a time, as well as from others like him.
Because no works on Western internal medicine had been translated, he persuaded Utagawa Genzui to translate such a work (Japanese title: Naika senyo) by the Dutch scholar Johannes de Gorter. He died in 1809 at the age of fifty- eight. The seventh generation physician of the same family, Katsuragawa Kunioki, also used the name Hoshu and was active in Dutch studies at the end of the Edo and the beginning of the Meiji period.
In addition, his writings include works on geography and medicine such as the Chikyu zenzu, Bankoku zusetsu, Oranda yakusen, Kaiju biybhb, and Geka taisei.
He also produced the Roshia-shi and Rokoku jijitsu-sho, works giving information on Russia that were in part translated from Dutch sources.
The work, entitled Kaitai shinsho, represents the earliest translation of a European medical text into Japanese.
He wrote the Hokusa bunryaku and Hyoryumin goranki.
