Shigeaki Hinohara: eight decades at one hospital

Most careers move. Shigeaki Hinohara’s stayed in one place, at St Luke’s International Hospital in Tokyo, from 1941 until his death in 2017, and grew wider every decade.⁴¹

A long arc

He was born in Yamaguchi Prefecture in 1911 and graduated in medicine from Kyoto Imperial University in 1937.⁴⁵ Four years later he joined St Luke’s.⁴

The hospital years spanned extraordinary events. He treated victims of the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945.¹³ In 1970 he was a passenger on a hijacked Japan Airlines flight.³⁵ In 1995, when sarin was released on the Tokyo subway, he was director of St Luke’s, which treated the victims.³⁵

The physician as public educator

His most lasting influence was on how Japan thinks about health. In 1954 he introduced a comprehensive annual health check.¹ In 1978 he proposed the term “lifestyle-related disease”, later adopted by Japan’s health ministry.²

He wrote for the public too, publishing some 75 books, including a bestseller written at 101.¹ In 2000 he founded the New Elderly Association.²⁵ He received Japan’s Order of Culture in 2005.²⁵

He had firm views on rules about rest and routine. “It’s best not to tire the body with too many rules such as lunchtime and bedtime,” he once said.¹

He continued to see patients until a few months before his death, in Tokyo in July 2017, at the age of 105.¹²

What the path shows

The modern advice to doctors is often to move: new posts, new countries, new specialties. Hinohara’s life is the opposite case. He stayed, and widened his role from clinician to hospital leader, public-health reformer, author and teacher, without changing address.

It is also a reminder that richness in medicine can be measured in years. A career that is sustainable, and still interesting, at 90 is a rare achievement, and worth thinking about at 25.