Dr. Noguchi's Journey: A Life of Medical Search and Discovery

by Atsushi Kita

The story of Hideyo Noguchi's rise from poor farm boy to famous medical pioneer is a true rags-to-riches story. Born into a family of struggling sharecroppers in a village in the snow country of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 4770023553
• ISBN13: 9784770023551
• Release Date: July 2005
• Publisher: Kodansha
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.2" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Lost in Translation?

If there is anything about this book that is great, it is the translation. In comparison with the original text, the translation is perfect, it reflects every aspect, emotion, thought, and idea in book accurately and precisely. A lot of books don't get translated half as well as this one. I really liked this book and I think everyone interested in this subject should look into it, at least have a peek.

Through devotions to science, he lived and died for humanity

Dr. Hideyo Noguchi may not quite be a household name in the United States, but in Japan people see his face every time they reach into their wallets to pull out a ubiquitous 1,000 yen note, and the small, isolated farmhouse where he was born sees over 1 million annual tourists making the long trek. A dedicated and important pioneer in the field of microbiology and epidemics, the modern world owes much to Noguchi, even though they may not know the extent of the debt. "Dr. Nogochi's Journey" is a semi-biography of the great doctor's life, and an attempt to reconcile the conflicting portraits of the genius Noguchi and the worthless drunk and spend-thrift Noguchi, both sides of which have been trumpeted in Japan at some time or other. A semi-biography only, because as in a more-typical style of a Japanese history book a story is told, leaving us privy to quoted dialog and Noguchi's personal inner thoughts, things that the author could not possibly be pulling from authenticated sources. Nogochi definitely lived an interesting life, coming from the grinding, dismal poverty of a poor farming family in Meji Japan, and rising to a level where he could freely introduce friends to the President of the United States and dined with Emperors. His rise is something achieved by both his own drive, talent and ambition, as well as with the sacrifices of many others who saw something in the child that they believed in. His club-like left hand, destroyed in a fire when he was just a baby, became the thing that shamed him and spurred him to out-distance his classmates. He shamelessly begged money and connections from his friends, family and co-workers, little of which was ever payed back. So single-minded was he that failure was never an option, and he managed to get whatever he needed to go to medical school, to leave Japan, and to discover and cure ravaging epidemic diseases like syphilis, rocky mountain fever, the bubonic plague, and the devastating yellow fever. An interesting idea in "Dr. Noguchi's Journey" is that Noguchi, while considered a national hero in Japan, could never have achieved anything in his home country. He is, in many ways, a symbol of the limitation of Japanese culture, where seniority and connections matter more than drive and talent. Only by traveling to the US could Noguchi rise to a necessary level to leverage his talents and bring relief to a suffering world. Indeed, Japan was one of the last countries to recognize this expatriate during his lifetime. I found his life fascinating, as well as the musings on the nature of genius, that it is not a matter of brains and talents so much as an environment where those brains and talents are allowed to reach fruition. Without his army of benefactors, Noguchi would probably never have amounted to more than a local farmer, if even that. The only complaint I have with "Dr. Noguchi's Journey" is either the writing style or the translation, although I do not know which. The opening chapt