Alexander R. Bay. Beriberi in Modern Japan: The Making of a National Disease. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2012. x + 230 pp. 111. $95.00 (978-1-58046-427-7).

摘要

What, in Japanese eyes, made beriberi "an enemy greater than Russia" (p. 74)? Although by 1905 the disease had become widespread across Monsoon Asia, beriberi had such exceptional and exemplary importance that some commentators regarded it as being "peculiar" to Japan. Few diseases, tuberculosis apart, held such national and imperial significance for Japan; few stood so centrally for the demands and dilemmas of its modernity. Once confined to urban elites, during the Meiji period, as consumption of milled rice grew, beriberi became "a disease of War and imperial expansion" (p. 53): while other armies were preoccupied with the ravages of syphilis, for Japan's armed forces beriberi was the great enemy to be destroyed. Beriberi incidence rates among the peacetime military stood at 30 percent, but in the wars of the 1890s and 1900s against China and Russia they soared to a staggering 90 percent: in the Russo-Japanese War alone there were 250,000 cases of beriberi and 27,000 deaths. Beriberi afflicted the student population and caused the loss of an estimated 6 to 10 million working days a year, a hemorrhaging of intellectual talent and labor power no self-consciously modern nation could afford.