Siebold as a Surgeon, Physician and Medical Teacher in Japan

Abstract

Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796–1866), a German physician, landed at Nagasaki in August 1823 (Fig. 1) as a physician working in a Dutch settlement. Under the national seclusion policy of the Tokugawa Shogunate, Japan’s doors were closed to the West from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and Japan had no trade relations with any countries except China and Holland; entry into the country was therefore denied to all Europeans apart from the Dutch. Siebold entered Japan as a Dutchman, despite his German accent.