HOBSON, Benjamin.

Fuei shinsetsu [trans.: Manual of Gynecology, Obstetrics, and the Nursing Care of the Newborn].

Many woodcut illus. in the text. In Chinese with Japanese reading marks. 47; 27 folding leaves. Two vols. 8vo, orig. wrappers (Vol. II with some minor marginal worming), new stitching. Kyoto: 1859.

First edition to be published in Japan of a quite fascinating book. Hobson (1816-73), after studying medicine at University College, London, served with the London Missionary Society in China. Hobson arrived in Macao in 1839 and spent about twenty years in China in hospitals in Macao, Hong Kong, Canton and Shanghai. He was a pioneer in proposing the establishment of a medical school in Hong Kong for Chinese students and wrote many books, including an English/Chinese medical dictionary.

A serious student of the Chinese language, Hobson also wrote in Chinese a series of four original medical books with two Chinese collaborators: Outline of Anatomy and Physiology (Quanti xin lun, 1850), First Lines of the Practice of Surgery in the West (Xiyi lüelun, 1857), Practice of Medicine and Materia Medica (Neike xinshuo, 1858), and the present work (1858). These books were not translations of individual European medical works but entirely new and unique distillations of what Hobson considered to be the best in Western medicine. They were widely used within the Chinese missionary medical schools for the rest of the century.

Their immediate success caused the present work to be quickly published in Japan as well. A copy had been presented by one of Hobson’s Chinese assistants to the Japanese publisher Fukuchi who added the Japanese reading marks and issued it in Tokyo for the Japanese market in 1859. Vol. I deals with conception, pregnancy, and birth. The second volume is concerned with pediatric medicine.

The fine woodcuts depict many views of the pelvic girdle, the fetus in utero, and birth positions.

Fine set.

Price: $5,000.00

Item ID: 4888