KATAKURA, Kakuryo.

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Sanka hatsumo ("Instructions in Obstetrics"). First edition, second issue, with 7,500 characters of manuscript annotations to the text and illustrations by a contemporary Japanese physician. This copy is from the medical library of Dr Gabor Lukacs (b. 1937), who makes a detailed analysis of the emendations in his Extensive Marginalia in Old Japanese Medical Books (2010).In the middle of the 18th century, Japanese physicians began to take an interest in obstetrics, previously the preserve of midwives. Katakura (1750-1822) was the student of Kagawa Genetsu, the author of the first Japanese work on obstetrics to be based on practical investigation. Sanka hatsumo corrects several misconceptions of Kagawa, including those concerning twins, drawing on medical knowledge that had flowed from Europe to Japan via Dutch traders. He describes how deliver children in abnormal positions and how to correct transverse positions. The illustrations, found in Volume VI and showing foetuses in the womb, are largely based on those found in Hendrik van Deventer's Manuale Operatien (1701), considered the founding treatise of European obstetrics. They show, for example, the use of forceps and the danger caused by the placenta wrapping around the unborn child's neck.The annotator, believed by Lukacs to have been working in the early 19th century, corrects the text, cross-references to other medical treatises published in China and Japan, and remarks on the philosophical and practical underpinnings of

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