Caspar Schamberger

Who was Caspar Schamberger?

Caspar Schamberger was a German surgeon. His name represents the first school of Western medicine in Japan and the beginning of Dutch Studies.

Schamberger grew up in war-torn Saxony. In 1637 he started studying surgery under the master surgeon of the surgeons guild in his native town of Leipzig. Three years late he finished his education and started traveling through Northern Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands. In 1643 he joined the Dutch East India Company, signing a contract for four years of service. Schamberger left Europe in the same year aboard the Eiland Mauritius, but the ship wrecked four months later near the Cape of Good Hope.

In July 1644 Schamberger finally arrived in Batavia, the administrative center of the expanding Dutch colonial empire. The next few years he worked as a ship surgeon, visiting Portuguese Goa, Ceylon, Gamron and Kismis, to return to Batavia again in 1646. In summer 1649 he arrived in Nagasaki and began his service at Dejima, the Dutch trading post in Japan. Later that year he traveled to Edo as a member of a special embassy, that was dispatched to Japan due to seriously strained Dutch-Japanese relations.