The headless body of a woman in her 50s was laid on a straw mat inside a hut at Kotsukahara in Edo's Senju area. Born in Kyoto and nicknamed "Aochababa," sketchy court records indicate the woman had been convicted of killing her adopted children. She had been executed by beheading that very morning, March 4, 1771.
Forty-seven year-old Maeno Ryotaku, Sugita Genpaku, 37, Nakagawa Jun'an, 31, and several other doctors in the hut were eagerly waiting for dissection to begin on this rare occasion when permission for the procedure had been granted.
Under the Tokugawa Shogunate that ruled Japan from 1603 to 1867, Western medicine was never officially approved, and traditional Chinese medicine monopolized authority in the field. Hence, the man who showed up at the shack to do the dissection was not a doctor, but a 90-year-old member of the executioner "caste," who said he'd been opening up bodies to show to the medically curious since he was young.