He was born the eldest son of Takaki Kisuke, a gōshi of the Satsuma domain, at Mukasa in Hyūga province, today's Takaoka-chō in Miyazaki City. His common name was Tōshirō. Gōshi were low-ranking samurai living in farming villages, and their life was far from rich. Today his birthplace of Miyazaki introduces him as the father of vitamins.
From his late teens he apprenticed himself to Ishigami Ryōsaku, a Satsuma physician trained in Western medicine. When the Boshin War broke out, he went to the battlefield as an army doctor with the Satsuma troops. Treating wounded soldiers, he learned that many lives could not be saved by the medicine of the time, and resolved to study Western medicine in earnest.
Having begun studying English and Western medicine the year before, he entered the Kagoshima medical school founded by the Satsuma domain this year. Its principal, the British doctor William Willis, recognized his ability and raised him to a teaching position while still a student. Encountering British-style medicine, which valued examining patients directly, was a major turning point.
When his teacher Ishigami Ryōsaku became a senior official of the office overseeing naval medicine, Takaki became a navy doctor on his recommendation. While working at the naval hospital he submitted many proposals on hospitals and the medical officer system, and was promoted within the year. From here he began the path of shouldering naval medicine.
Recognized by Anderson, a British naval surgeon teaching at the naval hospital school, he went to study at Anderson's alma mater, St Thomas's Hospital Medical School in London. There he earned excellent results and, at this hospital that housed Nightingale's nursing school, learned deeply the importance of nursing in medicine.
After returning home he worried that Japanese medicine was leaning toward German-style research first. So with Matsuyama Tōan and others he opened the Seii-kai training school, a place to learn medicine based on the British idea of treating the patient, not the disease. This was the origin of today's Jikei University School of Medicine.
At a temple in Shiba, Tokyo, he founded the Yūshi Kyōritsu Tokyo Hospital to treat poor patients free of charge. He invited his superior Totsuka Bunkai as director and became deputy director himself. He also received support from Katsu Kaishū and others. Around the same time he took a central role in naval medicine and began in earnest to tackle the beriberi spreading among sailors.
Believing beriberi was linked to diet, he made the training cruise of the warship Tsukuba an experiment to see whether improved meals could prevent it. Sent along the same route as the warship Ryūjō, on which beriberi had been rampant, the Tsukuba saw patients drop sharply and not a single death. The experiment is regarded as the beginning of epidemiology in Japan.
To put into practice the importance of nursing he had learned in London, and with the support of the ladies' charity of Ōyama Sutematsu and others, he opened a training school for nurses, the first nursing school in Japan. That same year he became surgeon general, the highest rank of naval doctor. He published his dietary theory, but no one in academic circles agreed, and he reportedly met only rebuttals.
When doctoral degrees were awarded for the first time in Japan, he was among the recipients of a doctorate in medicine. This year the nursing school sent off its first five graduates in the presence of the empress. In the navy, dietary reform had sharply cut beriberi cases, and its results had taken shape despite academic opposition.
He stepped down as head of the navy's medical bureau and entered the reserve. Afterwards he kept seeing patients at the Jikei hospital and elsewhere, and was also appointed to the House of Peers, serving until his death. He held posts such as president of a physicians' association, continuing to serve society in both medicine and education.
For his long service he was raised to the peerage and given the title of baron. Born into a low-ranking rural samurai family, he had at last joined the nobility. People praised his success. Meanwhile, over the cause of beriberi, differences of view with the army and scholars trained in German medicine had long continued.
He gave lectures at Columbia University in America and at his alma mater medical school in London. Their content appeared in American and British medical journals, and his achievement of preventing beriberi through diet became widely known around the world. After vitamins were later discovered, his foresight was valued even more highly.
He died of a cerebral hemorrhage. The school, hospital and nursing school he founded continue today as the Jikei University School of Medicine, its hospital and its nursing college. In Antarctica there is even a place called Cape Takaki named after him. His spirit of medicine that puts the patient first is still carried on.
Tōgō HeihachirōKatsura TarōErwin BälzNogi MaresukeLafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo)Hoshi TōruOgino GinkoIsawa Shūji
People of the Meiji period ・ People by period
Based on facts found in textbooks and biographies. Uncertain points are marked as such.