Yellow fever hideyo noguchi memorial museum

From the Shore of Inawashiro to Global Fame

The Japanese bacteriologist Noguchi Hideyo (–) was born into an impoverished family in a farming hamlet called Sanjōgata in what is now the town of Inawashiro on the northern side of Fukushima Prefecture’s Lake Inawashiro.

Yellow fever hideyo noguchi memorial museum

He rose from this poverty—and from a devastating burn on his left hand suffered when he fell into the home’s firepit as a toddler—to display talent for medicine and bacteriological research. This would take him far from the shores of Inawashiro to pursue a bright career in the United States, doing research also in Europe, South America, and Africa to clarify the causes of afflictions from syphilis to yellow fever.

He would be considered for the Nobel Prize in Medicine three times before disease cut his life short in Accra, Ghana.

Today resting in New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery and co