Note (return) — Chapter XII · - TWO CENTURIES OF SILENCE

It was the Dutch, who, for two hundred years supplied the culture of Europe to Japan, introduced Western science, furnished almost the only intellectual stimulant, and were the sole teachers of medicine and science.15 They trained up hundreds of Japanese to be physicians who practised rational medicine and surgery. They filled with needed courage the hearts of men, who, secretly practising dissection of the bodies of criminals, demonstrated the falsity of Chinese ideas of anatomy. It was Dutch science which exploded and drove out of Japan that Chinese system of medicine, by means of which so many millions have, during the long ages, been slowly tortured to death.