Nagasaki Medical College (Atomic Bomb Ruins)

Nagasaki Medical College (長崎医科大学, Nagasaki Ika Daigaku) traces its lineage to the very origins of Western medicine in Japan. In 1857, the Dutch military physician Johannes Pompe van Meerdervoort established a medical training program in Nagasaki — the first systematic Western medical education in the country. This program evolved through several institutional incarnations: Nagasaki Igaku Denshujo (1857), Yōjōsho (1861, renamed Seitokukan in 1865), and successive prefectural and national medical schools, before being elevated to Nagasaki Medical College (Nagasaki Ika Daigaku) in 1923 as a single-faculty imperial university-level institution.

CAMPUS AND FACILITIES

By the 1940s, the college occupied a hillside campus in the Sakamoto district of Nagasaki, approximately 600–700 meters southeast of what would become the atomic bomb hypocenter. The campus comprised wooden-framed basic science buildings at about 600 meters distance and reinforced-concrete hospital buildings at roughly 800 meters distance, along with an affiliated pharmacy school, dormitories, a boiler house, and ancillary facilities. The college and its attached hospital served as Nagasaki's premier medical institution, training physicians and providing clinical care.

ATOMIC BOMB DESTRUCTION — AUGUST 9, 1945

At 11:02 a.m. on August 9, 1945, the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb detonated over the Urakami Valley. The wooden basic science buildings, located 600 meters from the hypocenter, were obliterated by the blast wave and immediately engulfed in fire. The reinforced-concrete hospital structures at 800 meters, though their frames partially survived, were gutted by fire and rendered completely unusable. A total of 892 people — including professors, medical students, nurses, pharmacists, and administrative staff who were attending classes or on clinical duty — perished. Among the survivors was Associate Professor Takashi Nagai of the Radiology Department, who despite being seriously wounded by flying glass, immediately organized rescue operations and began treating victims on the hillside behind the ruined hospital. Nagai would later become one of Japan's most celebrated chroniclers of the atomic bombing, authoring "The Bells of Nagasaki" before succumbing to leukemia in 1951.

On August 1, 1945 — just eight days before the atomic bomb — the gynecological ward had already been severely damaged by a conventional bombing raid, foreshadowing the total devastation to come. After the atomic bombing, the surviving medical staff relocated operations to temporary facilities, including the Nagasaki Chamber of Commerce building and the Shinkozen National School, which served as an emergency hospital treating thousands of atomic bomb victims.

SURVIVING RUINS — THE GATE PILLARS

The main gate of the former Nagasaki Medical College consisted of two stone-built gateposts (each 1.2 meters square and 1.8 meters high) flanked by two concrete inner pillars. The south pillar, inscribed with "Nagasaki Medical College" (長崎医科大学), was displaced 9 centimeters forward by the blast, creating a maximum 16-centimeter gap between the pillar and its base. The north pillar, inscribed with "Nagasaki Medical College Pharmaceutical Department" (長崎医科大学附属薬学専門部), remained relatively upright. Scientists later used the displacement of the south pillar as empirical data to calculate the blast pressure at 500–600 meters from the hypocenter, determining it to have been approximately 1 kilogram per square centimeter. A memorial stone at the site reads: "More than 850 of our teachers and friends perished here; in these gate pillars of Nagasaki Medical College we see the state of the bombing preserved." On October 3, 2016, the gate pillars were designated as part of the national historic site "Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Ruins" (長崎原爆遺跡), alongside the hypocenter monument, the former Shiroyama National School, the Urakami Cathedral belfry, and the one-legged torii of Sanno Shrine.

LEGACY

The college was reorganized in 1949 as the School of Medicine of Nagasaki University, which continues to operate on a modern campus nearby. The Nagasaki University Atomic Bomb Disease Institute (原爆後障害医療研究所), established on the foundation of the wartime medical research, remains a world-leading center for radiation health research. The university also maintains a Medical Museum with an Atomic Bomb Medicine Exhibition Room that preserves documents, photographs, and artifacts from the destruction of the medical college.