Seishū Hanaoka

Seishū Hanaoka (華岡青洲 Hanaoka Seishū, November 30, 1760 – November 21, 1835) was a Japanese physician, who was the first to perform surgery using general anaesthesia, ["In 1805, a surgeon named Hanaoka Seishu performed an operation using the new Japanese anesthetic "mafutsusan". Ether had not yet come in in the West, and it is generally held to be the first surgical operation in the world performed under general anesthesia." Perrin, p.87] almost forty years before Dr. Crawford Williamson Long operated in Danielsville, Georgia using anaesthesia.

Hanaoka performed a breast cancer operation in 1804 using a compound he called "Tsūsensan", based on a concotion of the plants Datura Metel, Aconitum and others.

His patient was 60 year-old Kan Aiya (藍屋勘), whose family was beset by breast cancer - Kan being the last of kin alive.

Seishū Hanaoka learnt traditional Japanese medicine as well as Dutch-imported European surgery. The imported knowledge was very difficult for him and other Japanese physicians to learn, as few foreign medical texts were permitted brought into Japan due to the nation's self-imposed isolation policy of "Sakoku".

The national isolation policy of the Tokugawa Shogunate prevented Hanaoka's achievements from being publicized until after the isolation ended in 1854. The delay meant anaesthesia in the rest of the world had to develop independently.

The famous Japanese author Sawako Ariyoshi wrote a novel entitled, "The Doctor's Wife" (Japanese "華岡青洲の妻"), based on the actual life of Seishū Hanaoka mixed with a fictional conflict between his mother and his wife.

Notes

References

*Perrin, Noel (1979) "Giving up the gun", David R. Godine Publisher, Boston, ISBN 0879237732