After shopping we went to a coffee shop.  This coffee shop housed the doctor’s office where a famous Fukushima scientist worked.  (That’s his picture on the sign in the photo above.)

Hideyo Noguchi is easily the most famous person from Fukushima Prefecture.

The coffee shop.

My niee and I.  I don’t think we look much alike.  Maybe a little.

Above the coffee shop, there is a small (one room) museum about Hideyo Noguchi.  It charges a slight fee.

Up the stairs to the museum….

TO UNDERSTAND THE QUOTE IN THE ABOVE PHOTO, READ THE FOLLOWING!

Dr. Hideyo Noguchi was born in Fukushima in the Aizu area in 1876.   His parents were poor farmers.  When he was one year old, he fell into the fireplace and severely burned his hand, thus having a crippled hand for the rest of his life.

An excellent student, he eventually studied medicine in Tokyo. In 1900, he travelled to the United States, where he studied snake venom.  Then he studied serology (the study of blood serum especially in regard to its immunological reactions) in Denmark.  Next, he returned to the U.S. where he studied bacteriology.  He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for his work with syphilis.

Next he began to fight against yellow fever and went to Ecuador to study it.  The death of a colleague in Africa from yellow fever prompted him to go to Africa to study it there.  At the same time that treatments for yellow fever were almost in sight, Noguchi himself contracted the disease.  He received treatment in Accra, but he ended up dying from yellow fever himself in 1928 at the age of fifty-one.

His face is currently on the 1,000 bill in Japan.  So look at it next time you see it!

The information about his life was taken from this site:  http://www.cao.go.jp/noguchisho/english/about/lifetimedrnoguchi.html  Go there for more complete information.

YOU CAN BASICALLY SEE THAT NOGUCHI SPENT ALMOST HIS ENTIRE CAREER OUTSIDE OF JAPAN STUDYING DISEASE!  HE IS A REAL HERO.