When I tried to decide on a title for the blog that I was restarting, I finally settled on “Gleanings in Dermatology.”
Perhaps there is no particular need to explain the reason for this choice, but I will briefly describe how it came about.
Dermatologists who subscribe to the journal Clinical Dermatology (Hifuka no Rinsho) may immediately recognize the phrase and think, “Ah, this must have been borrowed from Dr. Kenichi Ueno’s long-running essay series ‘Mokutaro’ Gleanings.”
(Kenichi Ueno,MD Professor Emeritus of Dermatology University of Tsukuba,Japan)
That is exactly right. I had always admired those wonderful essays and often thought how nice they were. Whether it is appropriate or inappropriate for me to borrow the phrase and use it as the title of my blog, I cannot really say.
“Mokutaro” refers to Kinoshita Mokutaro, which was the pen name used for his literary activities; his real name was Masao Ota. In his youth he wrote poetry together with figures such as Hakushu Kitahara, and he was active in playwriting and translation. He had a deep interest in Christian art, was fluent in English, French, and German, and his paintings were of a level approaching that of a professional artist.
However, his principal profession was as Professor of Dermatology at the University of Tokyo before the war. Even if his name is unfamiliar, many people may recognize the term Ota’s nevus. There are not many dermatological conditions named after Japanese physicians, and among them Naevus of Ota is perhaps one of the most internationally well-known.
Be that as it may, when ordinary people hear the phrase “gleaning,” they probably first think of Jean-François Millet’s famous oil painting The Gleaners. I had assumed it simply depicted the everyday life of poor rural people. However, when I looked it up in Wikipedia, I learned that it carries a deeper meaning. In Europe, wheat was harvested by cutting down the stalks with long sickles and gathering them with forks before threshing. During this process many ears of grain inevitably remained scattered on the ground. According to the law described in the Book of Leviticus in the Old Testament, landowners were forbidden to collect every last ear of grain; some were intentionally left behind so that poor farmers, widows, and other impoverished people might gather them as sustenance.
Thus the “gleanings” could be seen either as something precious or as something trivial. The English word gleaning also carries the meaning of “gradually gathering bits of information or knowledge.” Perhaps Dr. Ueno used the term in this sense; or perhaps it reflected his modesty, suggesting that one could follow only a small part of Mokutaro’s vast legacy. Until recently, I had no idea that the word gleaning contained such deep implications.
When I think about this background, it begins to seem even more presumptuous for a modest blog—little more than the memoranda of an aging dermatologist—to borrow the word gleanings for its title without permission. Still, I have taken the liberty of imagining that Dr. Ueno, now in heaven, might kindly overlook it, given the small scale of this blog.
My intention is simply to take up various topics in dermatology—from near and far, past and present—and record them as notes for myself. If, under the title Gleanings, there also lingers a faint sense of admiration for the great pioneers of dermatology, that would make me very happy.
English version prepared with AI Assistance
(Originally published in Japanese on November 20, 2017)