[A bibliographical study on Shutei Nakagawa's "Mayaku-ko" (a collection of anesthetics and analgesics)--a comparism of four manuscripts].

The greatest achievement of Seishu Hanaoka, one of the greatest surgeons in the Edo period, was the innovation of an oral general anesthetic called "Mafutsu-San" and its clinical application, however, the detailed circumstances of the innovation remain unkown to us. Shutei Nakagawa, a close friend of Hanaoka, wrote a small pamphlet entitled "Mayaku-ko" in 1796. This brochure is very important for clarifying the process of Hanaoka's study on the general anesthetic. At present I have found four manuscripts of "Mayaku-ku" which are in the Fujikawa Library of Kyoto University, Soda's Library (Personal Library), the Kyo-u Library of Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, and Matsuki's Library (Author's Library). They are classified bibliographically into two groups. The one includes two manuscripts of the Fujikawa Library and Soda's Library, which describe twenty prescriptions. The other two are the manuscripts of Kyo-u and Matsuki's Libraries describing only fourteen recipes. Among them, the Fujikawa's manuscript is the best, because it has a postscript by Yakushi Mori who transcribed this manuscript from the orginal by Shutei Nakagawa. The Fujikawa manuscript has four illustrations of plants in the end of the manuscript which the other three manuscripts lack. As the original manuscript by Nakagawa was lost in a fire in 1867, it is possible to make an accurate reproduction of the original by bibliographical comparison of four extant manuscripts.