Julius Scriba

Julius Karl Scriba (1848 to 1905) was a German surgeon who became one of the foreign advisors that Meiji Japan hired to build a modern Western style medical school system. Born in Darmstadt, he trained as both pharmacist and physician, graduated from the University of Heidelberg, practised in Freiburg and studied under the surgeon Vincenz Czerny. He was also a capable amateur botanist who published on the flora of the Grand Duchy of Hesse. The Japanese government employed him from 1881 to 1887 and again from 1889 to 1901 to teach surgery, dermatology, ophthalmology and gynecology at the medical school of Tokyo Imperial University. In 1885 he first described pyomyositis as an endemic infection of the tropics, and in 1892 he is credited with the first craniectomy for a depressed skull fracture in Japan. He trained many surgeons who later led Japanese surgery, and he died in Kamakura in 1905.