Background
Shibasaburō Kitasato was born on 29 January 1853 in what later became Kumamoto Prefecture in Kyushu.
北里 柴三郎
Shibasaburō Kitasato was born on 29 January 1853 in what later became Kumamoto Prefecture in Kyushu.
After attending the Jishukan, a school operated by the fief to which he belonged, he entered Kumamoto Medical School in 1871, studying under a Dutch teacher named C. J. van Mansvelt. In 1874, when Mansvcrt left the school, Kitazato went to Tokyo and the following year entered the Tokyo Medical School (later the medical department of Tokyo Imperial University).
On completing the course in 1883, he took a position in the Health Bureau of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In 1885 he went to Germany to continue his education, studying under Robert Koch, the founder of the science of bacteriology, devoting himself to research in that field.
He returned to Japan in 1892 and urged the establishment of a research center for infectious diseases, but his pleas were unheeded. The prominent educator and intellectual leader Fukuzawa Yukichi came immediately to his aid, and through the help of the latter Kitazato was able in the same year to establish the Infectious Disease Research Center in Shiba Park in Tokyo, with himself as director, introducing the study of bacteriology and serology to Japan. In 1894, when plague broke out in Hong Kong, he was sent to the area to study the disease. Shiga Kiyoshi, one of the members of the research center working under his direction, succeeding in isolating the dysentery bacillus, and others of his group made similar important contributions.
In 1899 the research center was placed under the control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but Kitazato continued in the post of director. In 1914, when the research center became attached to Tokyo Imperial University, he resigned and set up his own research center, called the Kitazato Research Center. In 1917, when Keio University established a medical department, he headed it, continuing to be active in medical education until 1928 and introducing his own particular methods of research. In addition, he worked vigorously through the Private Sanitary Association of Japan, founded in 1883, to spread a knowledge of sanitary methods among the populace as a whole. He served as chief director of the Japan Society for the Prevention of Tuberculosis; and in 1909, when the Saiseikai, an imperially sponsored organization for medical aid was established, he acted as a member of the board of trustees, in these and other ways making an important contribution to the social welfare of the nation. In cooperation with Emile von Behring he developed a serum for diphtheria and conducted research on tuberculosis. In 1906 he became a member of the Imperial Academy, in 1917 a member of the House of Peers in the Diet, and in 1923 head of the Japan Medical Association.