Description
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2022 Hagley Prize in Business History
Finalist of the 2023 International Convention for Asian Scholars Book Prize in the Social Sciences
In A Medicated Empire, Timothy M. Yang explores the history of Japan''s pharmaceutical industry in the early twentieth century through a close account of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, one of East Asia''s most influential drug companies from the late 1910s through the early 1950s. Focusing on Hoshi''s connections to Japan''s emerging nation-state and empire, and on the ways in which it embraced an ideology of modern medicine as a humanitarian endeavor for greater social good, Yang shows how the industry promoted a hygienic, middle-class culture that was part of Japan''s national development and imperial expansion.
Yang makes clear that the company''s fortunes had less to do with scientific breakthroughs and medical innovations than with Japan''s web of social, political, and economic relations. He
Trade Review
Drawing from the archives of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, Yang has written a thought-provoking history of the pharmaceutical industry in Japan. This important and readable book provides insights into the history of not only Japan but the modern world.
* Choice *
A Medicated Empire provides an important addition to our knowledge of the so-called self-made men of the Meiji period.
* Pacific Affairs *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Part I: THE DRUG INDUSTRY, ENTREPRENEURSHIP, AND THE STATE
1. A Strategic Industry
2. The Supposed Self-Made Man and His Company
Part II: MARKETING MEDICINES AND MEDICINAL INFRASTRUCTURES
3. Marketing a Culture of Self-Medication
4. Medicinal Infrastructures and Medical Missionaries
Part III: THE OPIUM EMPIRE
5. The Scandal of Opium (and the Colonial Exception)
6. Things Fall Apart
Part 1V: SCIENCE, SELF-SUFFICIENCY, AND WARTIME MOBILIZATION
7. Selling the Science of Quinine Self-Sufficiency
8. War and Drugs
Epilogue
