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Abstract
From the beginning of Japan’s medical modernization during the early Meiji period, the nurse (kangofu)—literally translated as “women who watch and protect”—cared for the sick and wounded. She was a fixture in hospitals and clinics, caring for strangers in a time when it was not common for women to engage in labor in which they were paid to touch strangers. In Japan, the modern medical experience was foreign in many ways, including moving to designated medical spaces called hospitals rather than in homes or at religious sites. As the number of hospitals expanded, so did the need for trained nurses to assist physicians and facilitate the experience of modern medicine for patients. From the 1880s, Japanese nurses engaged in nursing pedagogy in a tactual manner. They debated how to better care for the needs of a diverse range of patients through medical journals and their own textbooks. Their written teachings were brought into communication with others that were being produced at the same time throughout the world. These nurses also participated in international organizations dedicated to the interests of their labor, including the International Council of Nurses and in organizations such as the Red Cross. Considering this active participation in- and contribution to- their profession, treating Japanese nursing as an adaptation of a western mode ignores their long history of caregiving labor. Nurses touched, moved, manipulated, comforted, and controlled patient bodies in a way that was different from physicians and surgeons. Utilizing textbooks, nursing publications, photographs, government documents, and even popular culture such as women’s magazines, nurses advanced medical knowledge about bodies, framing their experiences in terms of touch. This dissertation employs these sources to examine the intellectual and social history of Japanese nursing through nurses’ own words from the 1880s to the late 1970s. Through an analysis of the caregiving labor of nurses as well as the ways in which that labor was taught to other nurses, we see how touch was framed as a tool not just for teaching and learning, but for affective communication between nurses and patients. The ways in which touch was disambiguated as a medical technique different from other kinds of touch reframes the manual labor of nursing into a skilled process, one that can be analyzed as a means for better understanding the history of nursing. This dissertation recenters the narrative of Japanese nursing history on Japanese women themselves through an emphasis on productions of their own handwork. Through this study of Japanese nurses, we understand the link between touch and care not just as communicating information, but as communicating a sense of care: a sphere of human interaction in which women produce knowledge and teach others transitively through human bodies. Understanding the ways in which Japanese nurses historically learned and developed medical touch as a skill demonstrates how rigid cultural conditions of society are regularly broken down by the physical and emotional labor of women, even as technological innovation and concerns around disease are rendering that labor resource scarce.