[Hygiene policy plan at the beginning of the Meiji era: focusing on "the magazine of the Sanitary Bureau of the Home Ministry"].

Abstract

"The Sanitary Bureau of the Home Ministry Magazine," in which Sensai Nagayo served as the Director of the Sanitary Bureau of the Home Ministry also took part, provide valuable historical materials regarding the Sanitary Bureau at the beginning of the Meiji era. This paper reports on the hygiene policy plan at that time by using this magazine. That is, the plan considered the facts about the regional society when executing it, though it was based on the hygiene system assumed to be an ideal "Isei". In that case, it involved not only the police but also the doctors and pharmacists as practitioners who practiced hygienic clerical work, and it aimed at bringing the functions of the hygienic clerical work to the local populace. However, neither the doctors nor pharmacists came to play a role when cholera was prevalent in 1877. Rather, at that time, the police practiced the hygienic clerical work, and the police came to be parts of the hygienic policy thereafter, as indispensable practitioners.