Physician Kitasato Shibasaburō: Achievements and posthumous veneration in Shintō

Abstract

In 2024, the medical community celebrates an important date – 130 years since the discovery of the causative agent of plague, which was independently isolated by the Japanese physician Kitasato Shibasaburō (1853–1931) and the French physician Alexandre Yersin (1863–1943). Although the former had done so a few days earlier, as a result of misunderstanding and forgery, the honor of the discovery was given to A. Yersin, and the genus to which the bacterium is assigned is named in his honor. As it happened, Kitasato is almost unknown in European science, and some of his achievements are attributed to other researchers. In this article, for the first time in the Russian-language scientific literature, his life and achievements are discussed in detail. The outstanding physician isolated a pure culture of Clostridium tetani, was the first in the world to propose serum therapy, isolated Yersinia pestis, educated a galaxy of outstanding physicians and was one of the founders of modern Japanese public health (state sanitary and epidemiological supervision), preventing the establishment of plague in the Japanese islands. His services to Japanese and world medicine are truly immense. No less interesting is his posthumous veneration in Shinto, which was combined with the veneration of the German physician Robert Koch (1843–1910), a teacher and senior friend of Kitasato Shibasaburō. The deification of scientists is an extraordinary practice and represents a significant cultural phenomenon. It should be noted, however, that the cult of Koch-Kitasato is local and actually confined to the Kitasato Institute, where scholars are honored as patrons of the Institute. Interestingly, the other discoverer of the plague microbe, Alexandre Yersin, is deified within Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhism and as a god-patron (thành hoàng) within Vietnamese folk religion, which paradoxically unites the posthumous fate of these scientists.