Hayari Miyake

Hayari Miyake (; 16 March 1866 – 29 June 1945) was a Japanese surgeon specializing in gastrointestinal and central nervous system surgeries. He was an assistant to Julius Scriba, a professor of surgery at Tokyo Imperial University, and later became a student of Jan Mikulicz-Radecki, a German-Polish-Austrian surgeon. Miyake headed the Department of Surgery at Kyushu Medical School, where he taught Hakaru Hashimoto, the discoverer of Hashimoto's thyroiditis. Miyake served as the president of the Japan Surgical Society and was a long-time friend of theoretical physicist Albert Einstein.

Life Youth Hayari Miyake was born on 16 March 1866 in Anabuki, Tokushima Prefecture, on Shikoku island. He was the eldest son of doctors Gentatsu and Tomo Miyake. The Miyake family had a medical tradition spanning nearly ten generations. At the age of 12, Hayari Miyake moved to Tokyo under the care of his cousin and received his basic education there. He studied at the School of Foreign Languages and then completed a preparatory course for Tokyo Imperial University (present-day University of Tokyo), subsequently enrolling in the university's medical department. He graduated with the highest honors in his class in 1891. Miyake described this case of a patient with a fracture of the left temporal bone and right-sided hemiparesis, who improved after the removal of the inwardly displaced skull fragments, in the Tokyo Medical Journal in 1893.

Studies in Europe Miyake then returned to his hometown and opened a surgical practice in Tokushima. He was accepted into the clinic almost immediately. In 1901, Miyake earned his medical doctorate. He was one of Mikulicz's favorite students. When his two-year internship ended, Mikulicz offered him a position at the clinic. According to Mikulicz's wife, "he loved Miyake as his own son". However, Miyake's father requested his return to Japan, so he did not accept Mikulicz's offer. Mikulicz gave him a very favorable letter of recommendation. Shortly afterward, in 1904, Miyake returned to Mikulicz's clinic, spending nearly four years in total in Wrocław.

Shortly after Miyake left, Professor Mikulicz died of stomach cancer, having diagnosed himself with the incurable disease. Miyake learned of his teacher's death from an obituary in the Schlesische Zeitung on 16 June 1905. In 1908, three years after the funeral, Henriette von Mikulicz-Radecki gave Miyake her husband's death mask, his portrait by Läwen, and manuscripts. After the war, Miyake's son, Hiroshi, found the mask and made several copies, sending the original by diplomatic mail to Mikulicz's grandson, F. Anschütz. In a letter dated 27 April 1976, Hiroshi wrote that the mask copies were given to surgical clinics in Japan to be kept "as a memento of the father of our surgery". In 2002, one of the copies was presented to the Surgical Clinic of the Medical Academy in Wrocław by Professor Miyake's great-granddaughter, Sumiko Hiki. During the visit, Einstein played the piano brought by Miyake from Vienna.

In 1925, during the 7th International Convention of Surgeons in Rome, Miyake paid a return visit to Einstein.

Last years and death In 1935, Hayari Miyake retired and settled in Ashiya, Kobe. When allied bombing began to threaten the family, his son Hiroshi decided to flee from Ashiya to Tottori and in May 1945 took his parents to his home in Okayama. In 1911, he performed the first schwannoma resection in Japan, located in the right posterior cord of the spinal cord at the C5-C6 level. This discovery was made during his four-year work at the Kyushu clinic. It was noted that Hashimoto compared certain features of the disease with the one discovered by Mikulicz, formerly known as Mikulicz's disease, and now usually considered a form of Sjögren syndrome.

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