Ogata was born in 1810 to a family of low-ranking
samurai of
Ashimori Domain in
Bitchū Province in what is now part of the city of
Okayama. He moved to
Osaka in 1825 with his father, and began studies in
rangaku and medicine at a private academy run by
Naka Tenyū from 1826. In 1831, he relocated to
Edo to continue his studies in western medicine, returning to Nagasaki in 1836 to study under the Dutch doctor Erdewin Johannes Niemann, despite the
Tokugawa shogunate's strict
national isolation policy. In 1838, Ogata returned to Osaka to establish his medical practice, and in the same year established the
Tekijuku, an academy of rangaku studies, where he taught medicine, natural history, chemistry and physics for the next 24 years. Ogata used his small but precious collection of Dutch books, including a Dutch-Japanese dictionary and a Dutch encyclopedia, to teach his pupils to read scientific Dutch texts. He also wrote several books, including a treatise entitled
How to treat cholera, which he compiled in haste from various European sources during the great
cholera epidemic of 1858. From December 1849, he struggled to gain acceptance of the new
smallpox vaccination, eventually opening 186 vaccination centers from Edo to
Kyushu, and obtaining official recognition of the method in 1858. In 1862, Ogata was appointed personal physician to
shōgun Tokugawa Iemochi, who supported the introduction of western medicine and the establishment of a western medicine research institute in Edo. However, Ogata died a few months later in July 1863 of acute
hemoptysis, caused by the
tuberculosis he had suffered from for many years. His house still exists in downtown Osaka. Built in a conventional eighteenth-century style, the students left their mark on the central post of the second-floor classroom, slashing and hacking it with their swords. == Famous alumni ==