"Hideyo Noguchi (1876 - 1928)" - 2 -

Hideyo Noguchi, who was seriously injured by an accident and resulted in loss of left fingers, studied very hard at the elementary school with the strong support of his mother who wanted him to stand on his own feet, consequently, he achieved excellent results in the school.

However, it's not easy for the children came from poor families like Hideyo to go on to the next stage of education. In those days, it was common practice for the children of ordinary family to receive education only at a four-year elementary school, while children who were born in a rich family could afford the schooling required to proceed to the high grade.
However, when his teacher Mr. Kobayashi saw through Hideyo's ability and realized his great desire for learning and his mother's strong affection,
Mr. Kobayashi decided to support Hideyo to proceed to the next stage of education in financial and emotional terms.

At the age of 13-year-old, Hideyo could go through an operation on his left hand with the support from the people around him, but his hand did not recover completely. When he realized that his left hand remained disabled, he left following words, "A hand shall be appreciated when they have fingers and fingers exist when they get joints." But on the other hand, he witnessed splendor of the medicine and decided to aim at medical science.

After he graduated the school, he entered into Kaiyo Hospital where he underwent surgery on his hand, and learned medicine. Besides studying medicine, he learned several languages, such as English, German and French as well. His learning ability was so exceptional that he never looked a word up in a dictionary twice and he could read the original books within three months.
According to his superb learning ability and power of concentration, he acquired a license to practice medicine when he was only 20-year-old and then he was adopted as an assistant at Kitasato Isolation Research Centre that was known well in the world. Although he obtained the license to practice medicine, he made a firm resolution to live by researching in the medical world because of his disabled hand.

In 1900, Hideyo went over to U.S. and was employed as an assistant in Pennsylvania University. Four years later, in 1904, he became a member of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. During his staying in U.S., he read the result of his research works one and after and was widely known to the medical world.

In 1918, by order of the Rockefeller Foundation, he went to Ecuador in order to detect the pathogenic organ of yellow fever that was prevalent in South America at that time. He succeeded in discovering the pathogenic of yellow fever soon after he arrived in Ecuador and prevalence of yellow fever was brought to an end with the vaccine, which was developed, based on his discovery. However in 1928, Hideyo was infected with yellow fever in Africa and passed away at the age of 51-year-old.

Hideyo Noguchi announced numerous results of his research and left great achievements and no less than 200 monographs, but it's said that only a few papers appreciated in today's medicine. Therefore, in today's Japan some respect Hideyo Noguchi, and others deny him. However Hideyo Noguchi went to local field to research by himself in the early of twenty century and faced patients in unhealthy condition, which means that he might have a chance to be infected with disease. His ability to act deserves praise.

End