The Anatomy of Curiosity and Cosmopolitanism: Lafcadio Hearn’s Medical Imagination

Abstract

A decade before he made a one-way journey to Japan in 1890, in an article entitled ‘Travel An Educating Influence’ (1880), Lafcadio Hearn, the inquisitive young journalist then working for the New Orleans Item, declared his departure from conventional ideas of nationalism, and instead determined to make ‘one step toward a new and vast movement’ of cosmopolitanism.[i] Rather than abolishing local and historical peculiarities or going back to old nationalistic provincialism, Hearn pleaded for cosmopolitanism by way of curiosity – the insatiable ‘desire or inclination to know or learn about anything’, especially what is novel or strange.[ii] Recent work on Hearn’s cosmopolitanism, by Stefano Evagelista and others, has brought to light the manner in which this characteristic curiosity attached itself to the art, literature, and religious practices of the cultures he encountered.[iii] However, it has tended to overlook the central place of the medical and the scientific in Hearn’s transnational imagination.

[i] Hearn, ‘Travel An Educating Influence’, Item (6 February 1880), in Buying Christmas Toys and Other Essays, ed. by Ichiro Nishizaki (Hokuseido, 1939), pp. 31–34 (p. 32).

[ii] See the entry ‘curiosity’ (I.5.b) in the Oxford English Dictionary <https://www.oed.com> [accessed 10 July 2025].

[iii] Stefano Evangelista, ‘Lafcadio Hearn and Global Aestheticism’, in Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle: Citizens of Nowhere (Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 72–116.