Tomisaku Kawasaki

Tomisaku Kawasaki (1925 to 2020) was a Japanese pediatrician who first described the condition now known as Kawasaki disease in the 1960s. Born in the Asakusa district of Tokyo, he studied medicine at Chiba University, graduated in 1948 and practiced pediatrics at the Japan Red Cross Medical Center in Tokyo for more than forty years. After seeing a four-year-old boy in 1961 with a distinctive set of signs he later called mucocutaneous lymph node syndrome, he collected fifty cases and published his paper in 1967, despite opposition from academics who doubted it was a new disease. A national research committee confirmed it in 1970, and the 1974 English-language report brought it international attention. He founded and led the Japan Kawasaki Disease Research Center, and Kawasaki disease is now a leading cause of acquired heart disease in children.