[A brief history of biographical Seishu Hanaoka]

It was 1804 when Seishu Hanaoka (1760-1835), performed an excision of the breast cancer of a patient named Kan Aiya under general anesthesia by Mahutu-san. This is the first documented general anesthesia in the world. Numerous studies have been made about Seishu Hanaoka during the past 100 years and among them the monograph titled "Seishu Hanaoka and His Surgery" by Shuzo Kure published in 1923, had been thought to be nearly perfect and it had been thought that nothing had been left unsolved concerning the biography of Hanaoka. The present author made an exhaustive investigation of the monograph in terms of anesthesiology and found a serious forgery in the transcription of Hanaoka's "Nyugan chiken roku". The author also detected two forged photographs of the record in Kure's book. As Kure was a professor of psychiatry of the Tokyo Imperial University and a leading medical historian at that time, other investigators of Hanaoka followed him unquestioningly and they could not reveal Kure's forgery for 80 years since its publication. Because of Kure's forgery the biographical study of Hanaoka was retarded seriously and incorrect information about him has prevailed. The cause of the academic retardation is considered to have been mainly due to the lack of a bibliographical survey of original documents of Hanaoka by following investigators.