Meiyaku Museum
The Meiyaku Museum was founded on the former campus in 1982, for the commemoration of the 80 year history of the university. The museum has three missions. The first is recognizing the great achievements of Shigenobu Onda (Pen name Godo), the founder of the university. The second is preserving and storing historical materials and documents of the university. The third is contributing to the pharmaceutical education by extensively collecting materials related to pharmaceutical sciences and displaying them.
When the museum was reconstructed at the time of relocating the campus to Kiyose, we enhanced its display, with lots of specimen of medicinal herbs which had been collected in the Department of Pharmacognogy and laboratory of Biology.
The museum contains objects related to the founder, Dr.Onda, and "The Ohara Pharmaceutical Collection". The collection includes old pharmaceutical equipment and articles donated by a pharmacist, Mr. Ohara. The tools were used in a pharmacy dating back about 200 years. Parts of the collection is on public display now. The museum provides a room for a permanent exhibition and meetings. There are videos available in the meeting room, as well as displaying of a variety of herbs.
Taking the opportunity of moving to the area of Musashino, a suburb of Tokyo, the museum has also introduced 10 local species of medicinal herbs and trees as mentioned on the sign board with the title of "Medicinal plants in Musashino". The board gives a brief explanation for such plants as Corydalis lineariloba,Zanthoxylum piperitum and Epimediuim marcranthum var. violaceum.
The museum housed herbal medicine which include Glycyrrhiza uralensis, Rheum palmatum and other different species as well. A well-structured-display helps visitors understand how herbal medicine is utilized for Kampo.
The museum also displays crude drug from animal products such as musk, a unicorn's tusk, a rhinocero's horn, a buck's horn, which are unable to be obtained under the condition of the Washington Pact today. A musk dear, the crude animal for musk has donated by one of our graduates recently. Components and usage are written on the sign board. Among traditional medicine produced by animals displayed in the museum, there are other valuable things such as Pangolin manis, Hippocampus coronatus and Gecko gecko. The mummy was loaned to the National Museum of Nature and Science for the special exhibition named "Cultural Records about Specters",held in November, 2006, and "Medicine as a Philanthropic Art" held in March-June, 2014.
The museum displays facsimile editions of classical books on pharmacy and medicine from overseas as well. The books include the complete works of Hippoctates, "codex Vindobonensis", and a Japanese old medical book "Kaitaishinsho, Tafel Anatomie" (the first legitimate work on Western medicine translated into Japanese), and "The Beginning of Dutch Learning".
