To Have: Marriage as an Etiology of Disease Entering matrimony can be a dauntingly momentous life decision to make. In Japan between the late 1910s and the 1930s, the significance of getting married at times went beyond uniting two individuals and manifested also through a drastic change in one party’s state of health. For the…
Author: Tianyuan Huang
Tianyuan Huang is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Integrated Japanese Studies at Tohoku University in Japan. Her research combines the history of medicine and gender, science and technology studies, and agnotology—the study of ignorance—to probe the productive power of doubt and uncertainty in shaping ordinary people's lived experience of illness. Tianyuan has a background in international politics and public policy and worked as a researcher of international human rights mechanisms and politics for Tongyu, an LGBTI rights nonprofit based in Beijing. Having volunteered as a peer advocate for the Gay and Women's Health Projects (GHAP/WHAP) at Columbia University, where she was a PhD candidate, Tianyuan welcomes opportunities of interdisciplinary collaborations on subjects related to health humanities and medical education.
What Happened to Mrs. Taguchi? Reading Medical Pluralism in Imperial Japan
Trigger Warning: This essay discusses attempted suicide. What Happened in the Hallway? The story of “Mrs. Taguchi” had a happy ending. Having attempted suicide by hanging for a third time while an inpatient at the Tokyo Matsuzawa Hospital, an elite psychiatric facility where she received treatment in 1930, the 42-year-old’s symptoms took a sudden turn…
Limestone Caves, Concrete Buildings, and the Locating Technology for Edible Nests
The Name of a Bird Just before turning another year older in the summer of 2024, I learned that I had been wrong. What I grew up considering a type of “swallow” is a drastically different kind of bird. Allow me to explain by going back in time. In April 1936, an ornithologist named Canuto…
Some Are for the Poor and the Boor: The Hierarchy and Hierarchization of Materia Medica
All plant life are not made equal—at least not in the eyes of Japanese physcians during the Tokugawa period (1603–1868). This essay explores what was at stake when some plants were regarded as respectable medicinal herbs while others were dismissed as weeds for the poor.
Whose Words Are Those? Language, Identity, and Medical Texts in Tokugawa Japan
In the spring of 1795, Japanese physician Ōtsuki Gentaku (大槻玄沢,1757–1827) recalled the time he spent in his youth with Tatebe Seian (建部清庵,1712–1782), his mentor in medicine. Through his career as a specialist in external medicine (geka), Seian developed an enthusiasm for Western learning and Dutch studies (rangaku) (Takebe, Sugita, and Sugita 1795, preface). Taking off…
Intercourse Has Not Been Enjoyable: Married Women’s Sexual Pleasure in Imperial Japan, 1920s–1930s
Classification matters in creating the rhetoric and reality of “female sexual dysfunction.” A woman got married, but she did not enjoy having sex with her husband. What would come next if she lived in imperial Japan?
A Bloom of Love? How Saffron Crocus Took Root in Japan
A new medicinal plant took root in foreign soil and became naturalized, but why? If you’ve spent generously on flowers—perhaps for this Valentine’s Day?—look no further than this essay for company.
With Regard to the Pubic Hair of Women
Have you wondered what a society that holds young women’s pubic hair in high regard looks like?
The Appeal of a Royal Procession, Diagnosed
What drove people to interrupt royal processions, could it be mental illness? What political purposes could a psychiatric diagnosis serve, could it be more than dismissing a petitioner?
How to Talk to a Doctor (as a woman)
Tianyuan Huang // Reviewing recommendations on how to see a doctor from a women’s health journal in 1911, this essay explores physician-patient communication and what the distribution of responsibilities and powers tells us about a health culture in its fast evolving historical context.