Kaitai Shinsho, Western anatomy in Japanese

By 1770 Japan had been cut off from the rest of the world for more than a century, apart from limited trade with the Netherlands and China. Japanese medicine rested largely on classical Chinese texts that explained the body through the five elements and the flow of qi. A group of physicians led by Maeno Ryōtaku and Sugita Genpaku (1733 to 1817) took up the study of Dutch medicine, and in 1771 they obtained copies of Ontleedkundige tafelen, the Dutch edition, printed in Amsterdam in 1734, of Johann Adam Kulmus's anatomical tables.

Kulmus (1689 to 1745), a lecturer at the Gymnasium in Danzig, had first published his Anatomische Tabellen there in 1722, and it was translated into Latin, French and Dutch. Many of its illustrations imitated those of Philippe Verheyen, which in turn followed Vesalius. The Japanese physicians took the Dutch book with them to the dissection of an executed criminal, were struck by the accuracy of its drawings, and decided to translate it.

The work took years and meant finding new Japanese words for many anatomical terms. It appeared in Edo in 1774 as Kaitai Shinsho, in five volumes: a head volume of prefaces, introduction and illustrations, and four volumes of text. Maeno did most of the translating, but his name was not printed in the book. Nakagawa Jun'an and Katsuragawa Hoshū checked the text, and Odano Naotake made the illustrations; the frontispiece was adapted from the title page of an edition of Juan Valverde de Amusco's anatomy.

The National Library of Medicine describes Kaitai Shinsho as the first Western book published in Japan in the Japanese language, and notes that it called into question the Chinese anatomical theories of kampō medicine. Keio University's libraries credit it with making Western medicine a subject of serious study in Japan.