Duane B. Simmons

Duane B. Simmons (1832 to 1889) was an American physician, educator and lay Christian missionary who practised in Japan in the last years of the Tokugawa period and the early Meiji era. Born in Milan, New York, he sailed to Japan in May 1859 as a medical missionary of the Dutch Reformed Church. After a few months he parted on friendly terms from the mission and set up his own private practice in Yokohama, treating both foreign residents and Japanese patients at his surgery and small hospital. In 1870 he attended Fukuzawa Yukichi through typhus, and the two became lifelong friends; Fukuzawa later built lodgings for Simmons and his elderly mother on the Mita campus of Keio University in Tokyo. From 1871 Simmons worked for several years as a surgeon at Juzen Hospital in Yokohama, today Yokohama City University Medical Center. He is counted with James Curtis Hepburn among the pioneers of modern medicine in Japan, and he died at his home in Mita in 1889 and was buried in Aoyama Cemetery.