Physicians in the Japanese Army were not as well trained as their American and Australian counterparts. In 1937, the Senmon Gakko (class B medical school) was developed to train physicians through a three-year course, later reduced to two years, for the Japanese armed forces, producing a large number of poorly educated physicians. [1] Medical mistakes were common: Medical 2nd Lieutenant SAWATARI Zengoro recalled a medical officer in the Philippine Islands who killed an number of malaria patients that he misdiagnosed and treated as suffering from dengue fever. [2] An American internee noted that the Japanese physicians in New Guinea failed to recognise the first cases of scabies, [3] and the commanding officer of the No. 67 Line of Communication Hospital attributed lower limb pain to the tropical heat rather than beriberi. [4]
A Japanese doctor’s interactions with the patients shocked the American missionary doctor, "The medical officer was gruff and barbaric with his men. For minor surgical work on enlisted men, he made no attempts at sterilisation of equipment or at asepsis. For officer operations, he sterilised by boiling the instruments unnecessarily long. ...The attitude of a Japanese medical officer to his patients was that of the superior officer to low ranking beings in general. With the exception of one anti-aircraft medical officer whose interest extended even to the local natives, no sign of attachment of medical officers to their enlisted men was observed, although it is by no means uncommon to see it in other junior officers. Their attitude toward injured personnel who might become crippled is that because such will become a burden to the emperor, it is better if he die. One time a three star private with mitral regurgitation because it was said that such would die anyway, was allowed ‘to die in the army’. In the same way, a Non-Com received braces for some orthopaedic ailment, but was not sent home. Toward wounded men they were callused." [5]
Notes
1. U.S. Army Forces in the Pacific, National Library of Medicine, U.S. Government ■Final report of the committee for the technical and scientific investigation of Japanese activities in medical sciences,■ 5 December 1945, (last page).
2. Interrogation report 86: 10.
3. SWPA-1: 1.
4. Enemy publication 24: 47.
5. SWPA-1: 1–2.
Japanese medical:
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