Julius Scriba

Julius Karl Scriba (5 June 1848 – 3 January 1905) was a German surgeon serving as a foreign advisor in Meiji period Japan, where he was an important contributor to the development of Western medicine in Japan.

Scriba was born in Darmstadt, Germany and practiced medicine in Freiburg im Breisgau. In addition to his medical accomplishments, he was also a gifted amateur botanist, and published a book on the flora of the Grand-Duchy Hesse.

He was employed by the Japanese government from 6 June 1881 to 5 June 1887, and taught surgery, dermatology, ophthalmology and gynecology at the Medical School of Tokyo Imperial University. He returned once to Germany, but his contract was renewed again from 2 September 1889 to 10 September 1901. He is credited with performing the first craniectomy for a depressed skull fracture in Japan in 1892. He trained many surgeons who later became leaders in modern Japanese surgery. His Japanese assistant Dr Miyake Hayari (1867-1945) was one of the first Japanese neurosurgeons.

Scriba was called upon by the Japanese government twice during particularly sensitive international incidents: the first time was after the Otsu Scandal, when Russian Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovitch (the future Tsar Nicholas II), was assaulted by a Japanese policeman in 1891; and the second time when the Chinese diplomat Li Hung-chang was shot while attending the Shimonoseki Peace Conference in 1895 which ended the First Sino-Japanese War.

Scriba died of illness in Kamakura, Kanagawa prefecture in 1905, and was buried in the foreign section of the municipal cemetery at Aoyama, Tokyo.