{Inter} Cultural Japan

Yes, your read it right: Ukiyo-e and other Japanese paintings on medical subjects. The site is not very large (a series of yamato-e paintings and 30 ukiyo-e), and comments are not perfect or even totally lacking and replaced by question marks, but the whole is weird enough to mention here.

After all, what does the virtuous Japanese housewife do when her husband has leprosy? Full of care, she brings him a nice cup of tea and doesn’t run away as most other wives at that time did! A troubled lady is being treated with burning moxa; the print is a strange mixture of sadism (the painfulness of the treatment) with eroticism - the sensual nape of the neck dominates the print. There is also detailed information on the process of pregnancy, showing the growing foetus in the mother. This print is from 1881 and therefore already based on the insights of modern science.

The most horrific prints concern an old subject: the transcience of beauty, in the past usually depicted by showing the Marylin Monroe of Heian Japan, Ono no Komachi, as an old decripit hag and even as a decomposing corpse. Here we are shown the putrification of a female corpse in gruesome detail. Undoubtedly this served to propagate the Buddhist message that all things are mutable and basically empty (ku). A second series, on a more modern note, shows the dissection of the corpse of a female criminal.

[Screenshot of the site, showing the decaying corpses]

The site was set up by the Kansas University Medical Center; the collection of medical ukiyo-e is housed in the Clendening History of Medicine Library belonging to that institution. It was donated by Dr. Matthew Pickard, a student of the history of medicine and collector of Chinese and Japanese prints, books and sculpture.

[With thanks to Mari Diary]