Appearance of “Mental Hygiene” in Japan's Theory of Prenatal Care at the Beginning of the 20th Century- The Fusion of Public Hygiene and Eugenics: A Book Review

Abstract

The Motherhood Protection Act (1996), which corresponds to modern family health in Japan, was enacted based on the Eugenics Protection Law (1948) for the protection of national eugenics. This leads us to the question of how maternal health and eugenics began to merge in Japan. Answer of this will elucidate the characteristics of family health in Japan and historical background. Maternal health and eugenics began to be fused in Japan in the early 20th century. In this paper, we examined Taikyō, which is the source of this fusion. This book was widely disseminated to the public. An educational book influenced the Japanese women’s movement. Taikyō argued that from the standpoint of public health, responsibility for prenatal care should be extended to the husband, family, society and the nation. It emphasized that “mental hygiene” is necessary to produce a genetically good child, and that spouse selection is important. Books on prenatal care published in the first half of the 20th century, following Taikyō’s description of prenatal care as a form of eugenics. The National Eugenic Act enacted to protect national hygiene inspired the classification of the Japanese as ​​a chosen nation. The theory of prenatal care, which was created from the combination of public hygiene and eugenics, provided a justification for the National Eugenic Act, and this still serves as the basis for the Eugenics Protection Law and Motherhood Protection Act. It provides the “scientific basis” for recognizing that “unsanitary” and “disability” are bad.

Of Mumps and Men: Masculinity and the Severity of a Vaccine Preventable Disease in Western Medicine, 1760s–1960s

“…77 But by 1920, despite relatively negligible medical attention to women's complications, respected New York bacteriologist William Park declared mumps an 'occasional' cause of sterility in both females and males, levelling the sex difference between the two. 78 This readily accepted affirmation of mumps-induced infertility in the female body legitimised the prospect of male infertility due to mumps orchitis, despite a lack of medical consensus on the frequency of orchitis and the frequency and duration of resulting testicular atrophy. It also pointed back to the female body at a time when scientific research was expanding the possible ways in which male bodies shared responsibility for heterosexual couples' infertility.…”