A Medicated Empire: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Modern Japan

Winner of the 2022 Hagley Prize in Business History

In A Medicated Empire, Timothy M. Yang explores the history of Japan's pharmaceutical industry in the early twentieth century through a close account of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, one of East Asia's most influential drug companies from the late 1910s through the early 1950s. Focusing on Hoshi's connections to Japan's emerging nation-state and empire as well as the ways in which it embraced an ideology of modern medicine as a humanitarian endeav...