Japan’s Pioneering Women Doctors: Ogino Ginko and Kusumoto Ine
Who was Japan’s first female doctor of Western medicine?
By Ebony Brown
Who holds the distinction of being Japan’s first female doctor? Depending on how you look at it, two women can lay claim to the title. What’s indisputable is that both Ogino Ginko and Kusumoto Ine broke with the traditions of their times and blazed a path forward for women in Japanese medicine.
Ogino Ginko
Widely known as Japan’s first female doctor, she was actually the first licensed female doctor of Western medicine. Ogino Ginko was born to a well-to-do family in present-day Kumagaya, Saitama, in 1851.
At 16, she married Inamura Kanichiro, the son of another well-off Saitama family. As was the custom, their parents arranged the marriage. It was not a happy one.
A humiliating ordeal
Ogino’s husband contracted gonorrhea from brothel visits and passed the disease to his new wife. At the time, STDs were seen as a disease of sex workers, and afflicted women were treated unkindly by medical establishments. It was also…
