Takaki Kanehiro



Takaki Kanehiro (高木 兼寛) was a Japanese naval physician.

Born in Hyuga Province (present-day Miyazaki Prefecture) as the son of a samurai retainer to the Satsuma domain, he studied Chinese medicine as a youth and served as a medic in the Boshin War. He later studied western medical science under British doctor William Willis (in Japan 1861-1881). Takaki entered the Japanese Imperial Navy as a medical officer in 1872. He was sent to Great Britain for medical studies in 1875, and interned at St Thomas Hospital Medical School in London. He returned to Japan in 1880.

At the time, beriberi (considered endemic to Japan) was a serious problem on warships and was affecting naval efficiency. Takaki knew that beriberi was not common among Western navies. He also noticed that Japanese naval officers, whose diet consisted of various types of vegetables and meat, rarely suffered from beriberi. On the other hand, ordinary crewmen subsisted almost exclusively on white rice (which was supplied free, whereas other foods had to be purchased). Many crewmen from poor families, who had to send money back home, often tried to save money by eating nothing but rice.

In 1882, Takaki made a petition to Emperor Meiji to fund an experiment. In 1884, two battleships were chosen, the crew of one (the IJN Ryujo) being fed with a mix of meat, fish, barley, rice, and beans, the other (the IJN Tsukuba) being fed with only white rice, with both ships traveling the exact same course. The Ryujo and Tsukuba sailed to New Zealand, along the coast of South America from Santiago to Lima, to Honolulu, and back to Japan in voyages lasting some 9 months. Of the 376 crewmen of Ryujo, all of whom were eating only white rice, 161 came down with beriberi and 25 died. However, only 14 of the crew of Tsukuba, who ate Takaki's more varied diet, contracted beriberi and none died. This experiment convinced the Imperial Japanese Navy that poor diet was the prime factor in beriberi, and the disease was soon eliminated from the fleet. Takaki's success occurred 10 years before Christiaan Eijkman, working in Batavia, advanced his theory that beriberi was caused by a nutritional deficiency, with his later identification of vitamin B1 earning him the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine).

Although Takaki clearly established that the cause was due to nutritional issues, this conflicted with the prevailing idea among medical scientists that beriberi was an infectious disease. The Imperial Japanese Army, which was dominated by doctors from the University of Tokyo, persisted in their belief that beriberi was an infectious disease, for decades refused to implement a remedy. In the Russo-Japanese War of (1904–1905), 211,600 soldiers suffered from beriberi — 27,000 fatally, compared to 47,000 deaths from combat.

In 1905, Takaki was ennobled with the title of danshaku (baron) under the kazoku peerage system for his contribution of eliminating beriberi from Imperial Japanese Navy and also awarded the Order of the Rising Sun (first class). He was later affectionately nicknamed "Barley Baron".

Takaki founded the Sei-I-Kwai medical society in January 1881. In May, 1881, he founded the Sei-I-Kwai Koshujo (Sei-I-Kwai Medical Training School), now the Jikei University School of Medicine. Takaki's school was the first private medical college in Japan, and was the first in Japan to have students dissect human cadavers

Trivia
A peninsula in Antarctica at 65 deg 33 min south; 64 deg 34 min west is named Takaki Promontory, and is the only peninsula in Antarctica named after a Japanese.

External link

 * Jikei University School of Medicine: Our Roots - To Serve the Suffering Poor. Accessed 30 March 2006.

高木兼寛