3.2 Feelings and behavior viewed from Hygiene
Ogai researched hygiene in medicine. He published “Hygienic general drift” from the publisher Hakubunkan in 1907 and collected the research content in Germany from a standpoint of population health. Population health is the learning stemming from the knowledge, theory and technology to retain human health. It consists of personal hygiene and collective hygiene, and individual persons and regional groups are the subject of study. Here I search external and internal factors of diseases and connect the feelings to the behavior.
There is very few hygienic statistics from the Meiji period, but “Hygienic general drift” describes the development, number of patients, number of deaths, cause of infection and the prevention method and so on regarding epidemic diseases at the time. On the other hand, current hygiene promotes health activities efficiently based on scientific evidence such as hygienic statistics. Health maintenance needs to understand the pathogeny to prevent the cause.
For example, what does stress arise from? People have homeostasis which consists of autonomic nerve to adjust the body’s action, endocrine secretion of hormone and immunity to protect the body from foreign matters. People’s mental activity is considered a disease status when these three functions lose balance. Therefore, the systems don’t interact properly with each other causing the hypothalamic area of the brain to excessively receives stressors, and the orders don’t transfer throughout the whole body.
花村嘉英（2017）「森鴎外の『山椒大夫』のデータベース化とその分析」より translated by Yoshihisa Hanamura