The first lines of the practice of surgery in the West [Seii ryakuron] [Xi yi lue lun] [西醫略論]

Edo [Tōkyō] : Yorozuya Heishirō, Ansei 5 [1858]. Four volumes (complete), original decorated Japanese Fukuro-toji binding with title labels, 25.6 x 17.5cm. 62, 48, 62, 22 leaves, woodcut illustrations of (sometimes graphic) surgical practices, previous owner’s stamps (in Japanese) on the wrapper of the first volume, and first & last pages on each volume, pale watermarks to the corners, text in Chinese, with some Japanese reading marks, title and contents pages in English and Chinese.

The first Japanese edition of Benjamin Hobson’s highly influential The first lines of the practice of surgery in the West, first published in Shanghai in 1857.

Benjamin Hobson (1816-1873) was a Protestant medical missionary who arrived in Macao in 1859 and spent over twenty years practicing medicine in China, founding hospitals in Hong Kong, Canton and Shanghai. Fluent in Chinese, Hobson authored four books on Western medicine in the 1850s, each of which were entirely new works, not translations of previously published texts. In this work, Hobson, outlines the principles of the best practices in Western surgery, illustrated with details and sometimes gruesome woodcut illustrations of the maladies encountered by surgeons of the period. Hobson’s works was immediately successful in China, Korea and Japan, and was quickly reprinted and used at the missionary medical schools and hospitals in East Asia. The fourth volume adds traditional Chinese medicines to the surgical practices, with illustrations of herbs and plants which can be used to treat illness.

Dr Benjamin Hobson’s first wife died while on a voyage to England in 1845. Hobson remarried Rebecca Morrison, the only daughter of famous missionary Robert Morrison, the first Protestant Missionary in China.