Vitale, Judith (2020). Opiates and the ‘Therapeutic Revolution’ in Japan. Social History of Medicine, 34 (3), pp. 938-961. 10.1093/shm/hkaa051

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This article argues that the widespread use of opiate-compounded medicines in late-nineteenth-century Japan was partly a result of Meiji period (1868–1912) public health policies. An overview of the status of opiates in Japan from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries is intended to explain possible reasons: pharmaceutical reforms in the 1870s and 1880s were based on Edo-period (1603–1868) protostructures of regulated drug manufacture; in contrast, the Meiji government failed to introduce Western clinical practice within a short span of time. As a result opiates, marketed as Western ‘modern’ medicines, were smoothly integrated into pre-existing beliefs, according to which drugs and diets maintained bodily health.

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