Akihito SUZUKI

September 1992:	PhD (University College London).
April 2021:	Appointed to the Faculty of Letters, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, The University of Tokyo.

History of medicine

1) History of psychiatry

Psychiatric patients in Japan and other countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Asylums and psychiatric hospitals in Japan and other countries.

Psychiatric treatment for doctors and patients in Japan and other countries.

2) History of infectious diseases

Social and economic histories of infectious diseases in Japan and other countries.

My research field is social and international history of medicine in Japan and other countries. The particular subjects are psychiatry and infectious diseases in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, often with comparative emphases taken from major pioneering works in the last fifty years in European and North American countries. My research usually has a triangular framework: diseases, medical practitioners, and patients. The three agents help examine medicine in the past, present, and future. Diseases, medical practitioners, and patients incorporate many other backgrounds, such as the context of politics, economy, environment, family, community, medicine, science, technology, and other factors. Such total historical viewpoints make historical grasp richer and more precise and give future medicine more clarity. My research into psychiatry uses a substantial number of case histories of individual patients, allowing a solid statistical basis and imaginative understanding of the unique characteristics of the patients. Infectious diseases often provide an interesting perspective into the social landscape of the urban and rural environment and the involvement of the family and the community in the world of outbreaks.