Photograph of Kitasato (Bulloch, facing p. 598).
For a time the most celebrated microbiologist in Japan, Kitasato Shibasaburo (1852-1931) was born on 20 December 1852 in Oguni, a mountain village in Kumamato prefecture. In 1872, at the age of twenty, he enrolled at Kumamato's new medical college where he befriended C.G. van Mansvelt, a Dutch physician then serving as the main advisor for medical education at the school. Over the course of many evenings at his home, Van Mansfelt tutored Kitasato in a variety of subjects while encouraging him to deepen his medical education, first at the University of Tokyo and then by undertaking further training in Europe, which is more or less exactly what he did.
In 1893, Kitasato received a medical degree from the University of Tokyo. The newly formed Public Health Bureau hired him as a research assistant for Masanori Ogata, an associate professor at the university who had lately returned to Japan from Germany. Inspired by the modern instrumentation and techniques he observed abroad, Masanori Ogata had just opened the first modern bacteriology lab in Japan, outfitting it with the new and powerful German microscopes as well as other updated instruments.
The following year Kitasato married Torako Matsuo. A cholera outbreak at Nagasaki gave Kitasato an opportunity to put his microscopy skills to use, and in the course of his work on this outbreak, he "is said to have demonstrated the presence of the comma bacillus, the causative bacteria of the disease, under a microscope" (Tsunesaburo 391). Following this triumph, he traveled to Germany to work at Robert Koch's Berlin laboratory, where he remained until 1891.
Kitasato's productive half-decade in Berlin established his reputation as an expert of the first order in the laboratory methods that provided the backbone for the development of modern bacteriology. In 1889, Kitasato published a landmark paper on his method for culturing Clostridium chauvoie, the soil-borne bacterium that causes a catastrophic disease known as Rauschbrand or black leg in sheep and cattle. Kitasato cultured the anaerobic bacteria by "growing it in solid media surrounded by a hydrogen atmosphere" (Tsunesaburo 391; Kitasato 1889, "Über den Rauschbrandbacillus"). That same year, he published another important methods-related paper on tetanus, derived from a novel method for obtaining a pure culture of tetanus bacillus for laboratory study and immunology experimentation (Kitasato 1889, "Über dem Tetanusbacillus").
These papers were followed, in 1890, by a third landmark study, co-authored with Emil von Behring, a colleague at Koch's laboratory. In this paper, Behring provided material related to the bacteriology of diphtheria while Kitasato contributed material on tetanus, specifically on the use of cultured tetanus bacteria for the study of infection in the lab. Kitasato had learned that he could inject rabbits with a dilute solution of the isolated pathogen without killing them; having established a minimum lethal dose, Kitasato experimented with exposing the rabbits to even higher doses of the toxin, finding that subsequent doses did not sicken the rabbits who had already been exposed, nor did injecting pathogen-naive rabbits with an "antitoxin" of serum drawn from exposed rabbits. These injections, in fact, cured infected animals and rendered previously naive ones immune. "This report opened a new field of science — that of serology — and provided the first evidence that immune serum can serve in the curing of infectious disease" (Tsunesaburo 391).
When bubonic plague struck Hong Kong in 1894, the Japanese government sent Kitasato to study the outbreak using novel techniques including, this time, photography. In Hong Kong, Kitasato identified and photographed Pasteurella pestis (later called Yersinia pestis), the causative agent of the disease, and published descriptions, including photographs, of the bacterium in a paper co-authored with British naval surgeon James A. Lowson as well as a subsequent and more in-depth paper of his own. During the Hong Kong outbreak, the Swiss bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin independently discovered the same bacterium within a few days of Kitasato, and the episode was at the time generally hailed as a case of simultaneous discovery (see, for instance, the account given by McFarland in 1896; see Butler 202-203, for a later account favoring Yersin's priority; see Bibel and Chen, 633-34 for a modern overview).
Kitasato then returned to Germany where he was supported until 1892
by the Imperial Household of Japan. During this period he advanced the
scientific study of tuberculin, which had been discovered by
In 1901, Kitasato was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries of the tetanus antitoxin and the plague bacillus. In 1917, Kitasato became the first dean of the medical school at Toyko's Keio University. In 1923, he was elected the first president of the newly established Japanese Medical Association. He was appointed to the House of Peers in 1917 and made a baron in 1924. The Royal Institute of Public Health awarded him the Harben Gold Medal for service to public health in 1925. Various national academies and societies also offered tokens of esteem including honorary memberships, professorships, and other honors.
Although Kitasato died in 1931, his legacy continued to unfold for decades. His most notable students were Kiyoshi Shiga, who discovered the Shigella bacillus that causes bacillary dysentery, and Sahachiro Hata who, with Ehrlich, discovered the anti-syphilitic properties of the compound known as Salversan. In 1962, Kitasato University in Tokyo was named in Kitasato's honor.
Bibliography
Bibel, David J. and T.H. Chen. "Diagnosis of Plague: An Analysis of the Yersin-Kitasato Controversy." Bacteriological Reviews 40.3 (1970): 633-51.
Bulloch, William. In Memoriam: Shibasaburō, Baron Kitasato, 1852-1931. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1831. Internet Archive, from a copy in the Wellcome Library. Web. 2 February 2023.
Butler, T. "Plague history: Yersin’s discovery of the causative bacterium in 1894 enabled, in the subsequent century, scientific progress in understanding the disease and the development of treatments and vaccines." Clinical Microbiology and Infection 20 (2014): 202–209.
Kitasato Shibasaburo. "Über den Rauschbrandbacillus und sein Culturfahren." Zeitschrift für Hygiene und Infektionskrankheiten 6 (1889): 105-116.
Kitasato Shibasaburo. "Über dem Tetanusbacillus." Zeitschrift für Hygiene und Infektionskrankheiten 7 (1889): 225-234.
Kitasato Shibasaburo. "Über der Zustandekommen der Diphtherie-Immunität und der Tetanus-Immunität bei Thieren." Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 16 (1890): 1113-1114. Written with Emil von Behring.
Kitasato Shibasaburo. "The Plague at Hong Kong." Lancet, 11 August 1894, 325.
Kitasato Shibasaburo. "The Bacillus of Bubonic Plague." Lancet, 25 August 1895, 428-430.
McFarland, J. Textbook upon the Pathogenic Bacteria. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1896.
Tsunesaburo Fujino. "Kitasato, Shibasaburo." Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Volume 8. Edited by Charles Coulston Gillespie, 391-393. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970.
Created 30 January 2023
Last modified 8 February 2023