elites, the privileging of laboratory medicine over clinical practice, the sometimes blind faith in bacteriology, and the close relationship between government and medicine – had its roots in the movement of medical knowledge and personnel between Germany and Japan

Race is the theme of Chapter 5 as well, but Kim returns to German physicians in Japan, examining their engagement with Japanese culture via the emergent discourse and practices of anthropology. Kim explores the racial theories of Erwin Baelz, an influential figure due to his decades of residence in Japan and wealth of publications. Baelz argued that the Japanese constituted a specific ‘race’ that had emerged as a result of the mixing of three racial types, Korean–Manchurian, Mongol–Malayan and Ainu, and he associated these racial types with not only different regions of Japan but also different social classes. Kim astutely notes that Baelz’s theory of the Japanese race, while largely ignored in Europe, provided a paradigm for future research by Japan’s first generation of physical anthropologists such as Koganei Yoshikiyo and Kubo Takeshi. Both would attempt to ‘empirically’ demonstrate the inferiority of the Korean ‘race’ in relation to the Japanese and thereby justify Japanese colonial rule. Chapter 6 and the epilogue focus on the long-term effects of the encounters traced in Chapters 1–5. Kim argues that the peculiar configuration of the medical profession in Japan – the intense factionalism of medical elites, the privileging of laboratory medicine over clinical practice, the sometimes blind faith in bacteriology, and the close relationship between government and medicine – had its roots in the movement of medical knowledge and personnel between Germany and Japan in the preceding three decades. There is much to admire in this work, which joins a growing body of literature exploring German–Japanese cultural and social relations. Relatively brief (the main body of the work is 161 pages) and written in a clear and accessible style, it is well suited for classroom adoption. It is, however, not without some weaknesses. While Kim explicitly states that he wants to avoid the ‘great man’ approach to medical history, with the notable exception of the discussion in Chapter 3, famous physicians are at the centre of this account. It would be interesting to learn more about what the sojourn in Germany meant in the long term for the many privately funded physicians who made their way to Germany, if only for a few months. Chapter 6 is largely devoted to a retelling of the dispute over the cause of beriberi and the factionalism in which it was embedded, the subject of Alexander Bay’s recent and far lengthier work Beriberi in Modern Japan (University of Rochester Press, 2012). These issues notwithstanding Doctors of Empire is an illuminating work that shows how imperial relations of power shaped the medical profession in Germany, Japan and East Asia.