Background
Kōan Ogata was born on 13 August 1810 in Okayama. He was the son of Ogata Iin, a samurai of the domain of Ashimori in Bitchu.
緒方 洪庵
Kōan Ogata was born on 13 August 1810 in Okayama. He was the son of Ogata Iin, a samurai of the domain of Ashimori in Bitchu.
He went to Osaka and studied Western medicine under the physician Naka Ten’yu and later, at the age of twenty, studied Dutch learning under Tsuboi Shindo in Edo. He also studied under Udagawa Genshin and then went to Nagasaki in 1836 to receive instruction from a Dutch physician named Johannes Erdewin Niemann.
At the age of twenty-eight he returned to Osaka, where he began practice as a physician and opened a school called the Tekitekisai- juku or Tekijuku to give instruction in Dutch learning.
Among his students were Murata Zoroku (Omura Masujiro), Hashimoto Sanai, Otori Keisuke, Nagayo Sensai, Fukuzawa Yukichi, and Sano Tsune- tami, all men who played prominent roles in the political and cultural life of late Edo and Meiji times. He had as many as a thousand students at his school, and in addition to teaching, kept up a medical practice and wrote and translated works on medicine.
In 1862 he was summoned to Edo to become physician to the shogun and head of the shogunal school of Western medicine, being given the honorary title hogen.