Picturing the Politics of Pharmaceutics

Abstract

This article historicizes the practice of separating drug dispensation from medical practice in Japan, focusing on its trajectory from the Meiji period (1868–1912) to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. I argue that the prescribing-dispensing separation debate highlighted the paradoxical modern experience of Japan, where information on the prescribing-dispensing separation became embroiled in discourses expounding on the local/Westernization (self/other) binary. The prescribing-dispensing separation dispute codifies the professional identity and the roles of the modern pharmacist—an important chapter in the evolution of the pharmaceutical industry and medical professionalization in Japan. Recognizing that the modern pharmacists underwent a nonlinear professionalization as determined by interactions with other social players (i.e., politicians, physicians, journalists) in different discursive spaces (i.e., professional conferences, Imperial Diet sessions), I have turned to professional publications and newspapers in the major cities of Tokyo and Osaka, where the prescribing-dispensing separation movement was most active. By examining the material and working cultures of major participants in the medical industry (i.e., the pharmacists, physicians, medicinal traders, and the politicians), this article interrogates the production of knowledge in the transformative modernizing process of the apothecary and the pharmaceutical industry.