Medicine Time: a New Socio-Temporal Element in the Cities of Ōsaka and Kyoto in Late Sixteenth Century Japan

What is it about?

This essay looks at new elements of time in daily life in late sixteenth century Japan. The essay, distilling information from the diary of the aristocrat and physician Yamashina Tokitsune, discusses some new ways in which understanding of time was being introduced into daily life in an era coincident with the onset of a major morphological shift in Japanese society, namely, urbanization. That phenomenon was accompanied by the wide availability of medical services, timely access to medicines, and an incorporation of uses of the medicines and consciousness to the time rhythms associated with illness (or health) into daily lives of a wide variety of social groups in a way that we can not identify prior to this time. That is, patients incorporated what I will call “medicine time” into their lives. Beyond drawing attention to medicine time in daily life, the essay also draws attention to a new consciousness of life-span, body-time, and a broader existential reorientation of the epistemological grounding of life course, from perceptions of ephemeral simultaneities to longer-lasting continuities.

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