Japanese MS 25.

Unknown artist

By the seventeenth century in Japan, block-printing had become established as the principal method for the production of texts. Once medical books began to be printed extensively in the same century, it soon became practice to accompany the texts with illustrations in the form of line drawings. An example is the 'Kokeisai kyuho', a manual for treating emergencies, including loss of consciousness, drowning, poisoning and gynaecological emergencies. First published in 1790, this book was written in simple Japanese in order to be universally accessible and practically useful.