A multidisciplinary project, Bunbetsu sareru seimei: nijisseiki shakai no iryo senryaku (Classifying Lives: Social Modernity and Medical Strategies in the Twentieth Century) is the work of nine experts on the history, sociology, and philosophy of medicine in Japan and Europe.
In Osamu Kawagoe's introduction, “Life and Medicine in the Twentieth Century”, the rise of a “risk society” is described, a zone in which increasing numbers of destabilized lives are governed by measures composed jointly by medicine and society. Kawagoe illustrates this by referring to the improvement of life expectancy in nineteenth-century Germany, to which he attributes a growing value placed on life and a view of death as unusual. Factors that jeopardized health were countered by public hygiene, population control, birth control, and medical insurance. Twentieth-century medicine—not just in Germany, but in all industrialized Western states—pursued the goal of reducing the risk in human life. Working from this model, the book's authors examine the advent of risk society in Japan, with a number of German and English case studies added for comparison.
