Anatomical education in dental school: From the perspective of publications utilized from the meiji period to the prewar period

The present study focuses specifically on anatomical education over the course of dental school in Japan. Focusing on the first dentist training institutes (beginning with vocational schools for dentistry) up to past universities that gave way to dental universities and departments established under the new postwar system, I investigated the history of anatomy courses at each school as well as the educational contents at the time based on such information as descriptions of the content of representative anatomy textbooks authored by the anatomy teachers of the time. The results indicated as follows: 1. Regarding general systematic anatomical education, all educational institutions at the time, lectures were given by part-time teachers from medical schools. Based on the contents of textbooks at the time, the lectures centered on the systems and organs around the oral cavity, and did not appear to cover the whole body as the systematic anatomy. 2. Compared to systemic anatomy education, a greater amount of lecture time was dedicated to dental morphology, oral histology, oral embryology, and many textbooks covering these areas were also published. 3. Anatomical textbooks with titles beginning with “oral”, as in “oral anatomy”, were first published in 1949. All textbooks therefore had used the term “dental anatomy”, but the contents were limited to the systems and organs around the oral cavity. The term “oral” had not yet come into use at that point. As for books on systematic anatomy that covered the whole body, the first was a book entitled “Shikayô Kaibougaku” (Anatomy for Use in Dentistry), written by Ryojiro Futamura, that was published in 1925. The above described historical review of anatomical education in the field of dentistry revealed that education was biased toward localized knowledge regarding the oral cavity, teeth, and the tissues and systems around the oral cavity. Since dentistry or oral medicine is also one of the field of general medicine, it is considered important in the future to sufficiently provide systematic anatomical education concerning the whole body without distinguishing between medicine and dentistry at dental universities as well, from the perspective of nurturing dentists capable of also treating various systemic diseases