Tag Archives: Tokugawa

Seiseinyū and secrets: problems of recipe attribution in early modern Japan

In my last post, I looked at the problems faced by early modern Japanese doctors trying to figure out how to manufacture a new mercurial drug called seiseinyū, which had first appeared in the Chinese doctor Chen Sicheng’s Secret Record of Syphilis (1636). Yet although Japanese doctors eventually found ways to produce seiseinyū, the complicated movement of books and ideas between China, Europe and Japan during this period meant that even doctors who knew how to make the drug could be confused about where their recipes had come from.

The syphilis doctor Tokujitsu Junchoku, hero of Funakoshi Kinkai’s “Illustrated Syphilis War Tales” (Ehon baisō gundan, 1838). Courtesy of Waseda University Library.

One of the most detailed manuscript recipes for seiseinyū was written down in the late eighteenth century by a doctor called Haruhi Gen’an. Gen’an claimed this recipe had been passed down in his family since the time of his ancestor Haruhi Genryō, who in turn had received it from a Dutch doctor called “Seirukettan” in Nagasaki in 1711. Gen’an believed that the Dutch themselves were reluctant to share this secret recipe, and he took great pride in his lineage’s knowledge of it; imagine his surprise, then, when he discovered that Chen Sicheng’s Secret Record of Syphilis, which had recently been reprinted in Japan, contained a recipe identical to the one his family had for generations been treating as secret.

After some thought, Gen’an came up with an explanation for what had happened: just as his ancestor had learned the recipe from the Dutch doctor Seirukettan, the Chinese had also learned about the recipe from European visitors in the early seventeenth century, and Chen Sicheng had tried to pass the recipe off as his own. Indeed, it is curious to note that Chinese and European doctors started using mercurial drugs to treat syphilis quite soon after the disease’s arrival, and difficult to rule out the possibility that maritime contacts might have allowed one medical culture to learn the idea from the other. However, European and East Asian mercurial therapies for syphilis differed in their details, and it seems safer to conclude that they developed independently.

An army of antisyphilitic drugs defeats the syphilis demons. Funakoshi Kinkai, Illustrated Syphilis War Tales (1838). Courtesy of Waseda University Library.

But why did the Haruhi lineage attribute their seiseinyū recipe to the mysterious Dutch doctor “Seirukettan”? It isn’t possible to offer a definitive answer to this question, but a little background knowledge concerning the circulation and uses of medical texts in eighteenth-century East Asia is enough to suggest a plausible hypothesis.

Patients seeking treatment for syphilis tended to seek out specialists in “wound medicine” (yōka), a field that included the application of topical cures as well as surgical techniques. Eighteenth-century Japanese doctors were highly receptive to learning about European surgery and anatomy, which were much more developed than their East Asian counterparts at that time; it would thus be unsurprising for a Japanese practitioner of wound medicine to think of a cure for syphilis as more likely to be European than Chinese.

Nevertheless, Japanese practitioners of wound medicine would also have known about the Chinese surgical tradition and probably would have kept some classic Chinese treatises on surgery in their library. One such treatise was the Complete Book of Proven Remedies for Wounds and Ulcers (Chuangyang jingyan quanshu 瘡瘍經驗全書): the first edition of this book was produced in 1569, and an expanded edition published in 1717 included an additional chapter entitled “The Secret Record of Syphilis” – this was none other than Chen Sicheng’s book, incorporated into the new edition without attribution.

Early modern Japanese doctors often made their own manuscript copies of such medical treatises, especially if the only available printed versions were expensive editions imported through Nagasaki. Sections of multiple books could be copied into a single manuscript volume or a single book could be copied into several separate volumes; as a result, authorial attributions and the status of chapters as sections of larger works could easily become unclear. If something like this had happened to the Haruhi family’s copy of the Complete Book of Proven Remedies for Wounds and Ulcers, the original source of their recipe for seiseinyū could easily become forgotten, giving rise to a family legend that the recipe derived from a Dutch doctor in Nagasaki.

Syphilis and seiseinyū: manufacturing a mercurial drug in early modern Japan

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The Syphilis King consults with his minions prior to launching an invasion of the human body. Funakoshi Kinkai, “Illustrated Syphilis War Tales” (Ehon baisō gundan, 1838). Image courtesy of Waseda University Library.

Syphilis arrived in Japan in the early sixteenth century and spread rapidly through the country. The symptoms of the disease were severe but there was no truly effective treatment, and many patients thus turned in desperation to toxic substances such as corrosive sublimate (HgCl2, known in Japanese as keifun) in the hope that violent drugs might be able to expel the disease from their bodies.

A method for producing corrosive sublimate had been discovered by Chinese alchemists at least as early as the sixth century AD. The procedure involved mixing mercury, alum, and common salt into a paste and applying them to the base of a pottery vessel that was then sealed and heated over a fire while the lid was cooled with water. When the vessel was opened, the corrosive sublimate had condensed as small white crystals on the inner surface of the lid. The Japanese soon learned of and adopted this process, so by the time syphilis arrived in their country they had been manufacturing corrosive sublimate for nearly a thousand years.

Patients who consumed corrosive sublimate as a drug for syphilis would salivate and eventually suffer from suppuration of the mouth cavity. Doctors interpreted these effects as positive signs of the drug’s toxic efficacy, but the disease had an unfortunate tendency to return even after patients thought they had been cured, and there was a widespread desire for an improved formulation that might be able to cure the disease more permanently.

One such formulation was seiseinyū, a drug originally invented by the early seventeenth-century Chinese doctor Chen Sicheng. Chen had developed a large number of remedies making use of seiseinyū and published them in his book The Secret Record of Syphilis (Meichuang milu, 1636). This book was largely forgotten in China after his death, but a copy was brought to Japan and reprinted there, and it quickly became a standard reference for Japanese doctors who wished to treat syphilis using the latest Chinese methods.

Chen’s recipe for seiseinyū was similar to the standard recipe for corrosive sublimate, but it included a number of additional ingredients, the most prominent of which was an arsenical mineral called yoseki. Arsenical minerals were known to be highly toxic, but yoseki may have been included in the recipe for precisely this reason – either because doctors hoped that its toxicity would help expel the disease, or because they thought it might somehow balance the toxicity of the mercury in the recipe to yield a drug whose side effects were less severe than those of regular corrosive sublimate.

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Illustration of a vessel for manufacturing corrosive sublimate and seiseinyū. Ishibashi Masaaki, “Essential Formulas for Syphilis” (Baidoku yōhō, 1810). Image courtesy of Waseda University Library.

Japanese doctors who wanted to make use of Chen Sicheng’s remedies needed to produce their own seiseinyū, but Chen’s description of his recipe was couched in unusual vocabulary that they often found difficult to interpret. Even a relatively common word like yoseki could lead to misunderstanding. In China, this word normally referred to arsenopyrite (FeAsS) or the related mineral loellingite (FeAs2); in Japan, however, this word was often understood to refer to arsenolite (As2O3), which was a common mineral obtained as a by-product from silver mines and sold commercially as “Iwami rat poison.” Many other variants of this mineral were available, ranging from a high-quality “peach-blossom” variety through yellow and white varieties to a low-quality grey variety; the choice among these varieties was thought to significantly effect the quality of the seiseinyū produced.

In contrast to the basic recipe, which was widely available in published form, these more subtle forms of manufacturing knowledge were usually passed down in secret by family lineages of doctors. It was not until the final decades of the eighteenth century that some doctors began to publish more straightforward popular accounts. In my next post, I will consider one of the more unusual consequences of this tradition of secrecy: that at least one lineage of doctors thought their family recipe for seiseinyū derived not from China, but from Europe.

Chinese and Japanese Names and Terms
J. keifun = C. qingfen 輕粉
J. seiseinyū = C. shengshengru 生生乳
J. yoseki = C. yushi 礜石
Chen Sicheng 陳司成
Meichuang milu 黴瘡秘錄
Funakoshi Kinkai 船越錦海
Ehon baisō gundan 絵本黴瘡軍談
Ishibashi Masaaki 石橋正炳
Baidoku yōhō 黴毒要方