Number 014
Prof. Amanda Seaman, "Hidden Agendas: The Body as Stage in Japanese Popular Media"

【Date and Time】9 May 2025 (Friday) 17:30-19:00
【Venue】Room 117, Faculty of Law and Literature Building No.1, The University of Tokyo
【Zoom】 ID: 829 280 0028 Passcode: 854145, Free to attend
【Language】English
【Host】Death & Life Studies and Practical Ethics
【Joint Hosts】Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, Tokyo College
【Grant】Fuse Academic Grant

【Speaker】
Professor Amanda Seaman (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

【Abstract】
Edo period representations of the body are many and varied, encompassing gesaku literature, visual culture, and medical culture. One characteristic of these depictions is the desire to see what is inside the body. Looking inside the body extends beyond mere curiosity about the organs—it is desire to know how things work, why we are who are, and why we do what we do. It is both didactic—people learn about the function of the body—and entertaining. This mixture of metaphysical and physical extends through visual and literary imagery. With the advent of modern, cosmopolitan medicine in the late nineteenth century, this desire does not wane but gets transformed into allowing the patient and their families to watch surgeries or be shown what gets taken out. A contemporary example of this combination of didacticism and entertainment is the manga and anime Hataraku saibō (Cells at Work). In this anime and its sequel, the body is a city where everyone has a job to do to keep everything in working order.

At the beginning of the 1890s, particularly virulent waves of epidemics coming from northern Switzerland reached Geneva, which experienced an unprecedented peak in infant mortality due to diphtheria. Thus, the introduction of the “anti-diphtheritic” serum in Geneva coincided with a pronounced preoccupation with the disease on the part of the local authorities and doctors. Geneva’s scientific community could go beyond local isolation by networking with foreign institutions. This cooperation allowed the importation of new sera from the bacteriologists Louis Pasteur (France) and Emil von Behring (Germany) and the distribution of the product in Geneva starting in October 1894. In 1896, the French serum production model was copied locally thanks to the close relationship established with the Pasteur Institute. The Geneva serum was then distributed and used according to each physician’s appreciation of the product’s curability.

In my talk, I will show how the Geneva canton managed for the product to be accepted and how it developed medical and social measures allowing the production, distribution and curability control of the serum, in total autonomy and isolation from any national support. I will also emphasize the challenges of fighting epidemics at the time of emerging bacteriology, by highlighting the importance of local actors and international networks.