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Figure 1　Juntendo Surgical Experiments. This report describes the bladder puncture on an anuresis patient in 1851. (Image courtesy of Juntendo)466［Taizen Sato］Medical trainingTaizen Sato was born in 1804 in a samurai family in Edo and began his medical studies in 1830. His medical training from the latter half of his twenties was considerably prolonged compared to that of typical physicians. He wished to obtain training in Western medicine. After studying in Edo for some time, he moved from Edo to Nagasaki to learn to read Dutch medical texts and improve his medical knowledge in 1835.There were no Western physicians in Nagasaki as a result of the incident in 1828 in which Siebold attempted to take a map of Japan abroad. So Taizen learned from Ryohei Oishi and Eiken Narabayashi, two Japanese physicians who had studied under Siebold. Both were physicians of Western medicine, and Taizen acquired the skills and knowledge he desired.Medical treatment and education at JuntendoIn 1838, Taizen returned to Edo from Nagasaki, opened a private school, and began practicing and educating his apprentices. The name of the school was “Wadajuku” from Taizen Wada, the name he was using at the time. Several private schools teaching Dutch and Dutch studies already existed and there were also private schools of Western medicine featuring famous physicians; neverthe-less, Taizen was unique because he implemented Western surgical practices.In 1843, Taizen moved to the Sakura han, which lay at approximately 50 km to the east of Edo, and began practicing and teaching at the newly estab-lished Juntendo. “Junten” is a phrase from the Chinese classical literature meaning “to follow the will of Heaven” or “to conform to nature.”In Juntendo as well Taizen practiced Western surgery. Taizen differed from his contemporary Japanese physicians because he implemented Western surgical practices; however, it is not that there were no surgeries performed before he began to practice. To a certain extent, it was possible to acquire information from Western surgical texts in Japanese. Furthermore, Seishu Hanaoka performed a successful removal of a breast cancer tissue using full-body anesthesia in 1804, combining traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine. However, Taizen believed that the implementation of surgery by previous physicians was insufficient and that the anesthetic used by Hanaoka was a poison, which physicians should not use. Taizen completely focused on the use of Western surgical practices.Taizen dedicated himself to administering medical treatments described in Western medical texts. He translated and summarized the sections dealing with fractures and dislocations from the Dutch translation of the surgical text by the German surgeon Maximilian Joseph von Chelius. He also replicated the diagrams of surgical equipment and bandaging.We can learn about the treatments that Taizen performed from the records of his apprentices. In “Juntendo Surgical Experiments,” Kansai Seki, a student, recorded 33 examples of treatments by Taizen Sato and his people from 1850 to 1856 (Figure 1). According to Seki, Taizen performed the first bladder puncture in a patient suffering from anuresis in Japan. He also performed inguinal hernia surgery, surgical removal of cancerous breast tissue, and surgery for polydactyly. All procedures, including the breast cancer surgery, were performed without anesthesia, using a surgical method that differed from that of Seishu Hanaoka. For repositioning a hip dislocation, Taizen made instruments based on information from the Western books. The example reinforces the notion of Taizen’s dedication to treatments based on Western medical texts. Additionally, when treat-ments failed, and patients passed away, it was written that Taizen would wonder if there had not