Story
A merchant at thirty
In September 1555 a Portuguese trader in the port of wrote a short letter to a Jesuit he hoped soon to meet. Fr Melchior Nunes Barreto was on his way from India to Japan, and the trader, Luís de Almeida, wanted his advice. "God has ordained that I should stay in this land," he wrote, and he hoped it would be for God's service and for "some part of my salvation."He gave his reason plainly. He was "coming up to thirty years," the age, he said, at which the Church wished each man to settle on the state of life he would follow, "so that, following and taking the state that our Lord gives him to feel, he may not live in mortal sin."So he had decided to stay in Japan for a year with Fr Baltasar Gago, to discern what God wanted of him, and he asked Nunes Barreto to give him his counsel when he came.
The same letter shows the merchant still at work. A partner was carrying two thousand cruzados of his money to China to be turned into goods, and Almeida put the whole of it at the Jesuit's disposal if he needed funds on the road. What he asked in return were drugs, "which this land is very hungry for," and a chest of ointments "for the Christians, a thing they lack very much."Juan Ruiz-de-Medina SJ, who edited the letter, notes that Almeida was already practising medicine in Bungo that September.
This is the first of Almeida's letters to survive, and it is a good key to the man. He was rich, practical and generous, and he was asking, with real seriousness, what he should do with his life.
Lisbon, the Indies and Japan
The bare facts of his early life are agreed in outline. Almeida was born in Lisbon, into a family of Jewish origin; he himself had come to the Catholic faith as an adult.Ruiz-de-Medina knows almost nothing else of the family.On 3 March 1546 he received a surgeon's certificate from the royal secretariat in Lisbon, and two years later he sailed for the Indies.He traded in Asian waters, and was first in Japan, at Tanegashima, in August 1552.Two Japanese reference works call him a Portuguese noble; the Jesuit editor calls him a merchant and a qualified surgeon.His birth year is uncertain: his own words in 1555 point to late 1525 or early 1526, while a Jesuit tradition based on gives about 1523 (see Disputed).
The children of Bungo
When he stayed in 1555, Almeida stayed with the Jesuits of Bungo, whose lord, Ōtomo Yoshishige (later ), protected the mission at .The missionaries there were troubled by the practice of abandoning or killing unwanted newborn children. In a letter to King John III written at Hirado on 20 September 1555, Fr Gago reported that Almeida had given a thousand ducats so that something could be done, that the Jesuits had asked the lord to forbid the killing of infants, and that a house might be founded where such children could be received.Ruiz-de-Medina adds that Ōtomo Yoshishige, though not yet a Christian, did publish an edict against infanticide.
So the first charitable work of Funai was a house for these children, paid for out of Almeida's fortune; Gago's letter to Ignatius of Loyola of 23 September 1555 speaks of Almeida's alms for an orphanage at Funai.Heibonsha's encyclopedia, in an entry by Kishino Hisashi, puts his gift to the mission at about five thousand cruzados, part of which built the orphanage and the hospital.
A brother of the Society
In the spring of 1556 Fr , superior of the mission, received Almeida into the Society of Jesus at Funai, and Nunes Barreto, by then in Japan as provincial, confirmed his admission that summer.Several Japanese dictionaries give 1555 for his entry; the Jesuit documents give 1556 (see Disputed).
He remained a brother for many years. He was a novice still when, on All Saints' Day 1557, he wrote from Funai to Nunes Barreto, who had gone back to India.The letter is a joyful report. The church of Funai, given by the lord and "all of cedar wood," had been opened on 1 November 1556; a year later it was full.Almeida describes the Lent of 1557: Christians in church before the morning bell, the Passion preached every Friday night to crowds that overflowed the house, and the Miserere sung while the faithful took the discipline with so many tears that Torres more than once told Fr to hurry the psalm.He described a supper at which Yoshishige was the Jesuits' guest; afterwards the lord asked what the pictures on the altar meant and offered the mission a revenue. Torres replied that the Jesuits were supported from India, but that he would accept it for the hospital, which was in need.Near the end Almeida asks for prayers for his father, whose death he had just learned of.
The hospital at Funai
The hospital is what Almeida is remembered for in Japan. Ōita's official tourism site says that in 1557 the first Western-style hospital in Japan was built in Funai, that the young Portuguese doctor Almeida practised both internal medicine and the first Western surgery in Japan there, that it had beds for in-patients, more than a hundred of them by 1562, and that patients came from as far as and the Kantō.The site adds that a medical school for young Japanese students was attached to it.The old Heibonsha encyclopedia describes two buildings, one for lepers and one for the general sick.Isomi Tatsunori, in the Nipponica encyclopedia, credits Almeida with bringing European diagnosis to Japan, taking the pulse, examining urine and giving medicines, and with training Japanese practitioners.Torres, writing from Funai in November 1557, reports simply that a cemetery and a hospital had been made in Bungo.
Ruiz-de-Medina adds a fair note. Japan honours Almeida as founder of the Funai hospital in 1557, but the idea, and a modest dispensary from 1554, came from Fr Gago.Almeida gave the work his money, his medicine and its full form. Ruiz-de-Medina's own summary is generous: Almeida's orphanage "soon became the first hospital of general medicine and surgery in Japanese history," and his fame as a physician survives in Japan, but "he excelled above all by his tact in dealing with people, his dedication to the apostolate and the founding of several missions."
In 1560, under a rule of the Society that its members should give themselves to the ministry rather than to the practice of medicine, Almeida gave up the direction of the hospital.The work did not end; the figure of more than a hundred in-patients in 1562 comes after that date.Almeida, freed from the wards, took on a new task. He became, in effect, the mission's man of business and its traveller.
The traveller of Kyushu
From 1560 he handled the mission's dealings with the Portuguese ships and, because Torres was often ill, visited churches, carried messages and represented his superior before the lords of Kyushu.In 1561 Torres sent him to .When the Portuguese left Hirado after a deadly brawl in 1561, Almeida helped find a new harbour. A Christian from the capital sounded the bay of Yokoseura in the lands of , and on 17 July 1562 Almeida and representatives of the Portuguese captain met Sumitada, who granted Yokoseura and the land around it to the Church and freed Portuguese trade there from tax for ten years.In 1563, the year Torres baptised Sumitada as the first Christian , Almeida was sent to Ōmura in a crisis in April, with orders to stay at the lord's side; there he preached to Sumitada and to the women of his household at night, when the lord had time to listen.
The list of places where Almeida built churches or schools reads like a map of Christian Kyushu: Yokoseura, Kuchinotsu, Shimabara, , the islands, Shiki and Hondo in Amakusa, and Akizuki.In late 1567 he baptised the leading people of Nagasaki village, whose lord, Nagasaki Jinzaemon Sumikage, was already a Christian, two years before Vilela built the first church there.In 1566 he brought the faith to Amakusa, and the lord of Kawachinoura, Amakusa Shigehisa, baptised as Dom Miguel, opened his harbour to Portuguese ships and invited him.Nagasaki Prefecture's pilgrimage guide calls him the first person to bring Christianity to Amakusa.
Priest at last
In 1580, after a quarter of a century as a brother, Almeida was ordained priest at .He returned to Japan, and to Amakusa. He died at Kawachinoura in the tenth month of Tenshō 11, October 1583.Tradition places his death at what is now Shinpukuji, the family temple of the Amakusa lords; his grave is not known.The Amakusa Collegio, where the boys of the would study, opened at Kawachinoura in 1591, eight years after his death.
Remembered
Almeida is honoured in Japan as a founder of Western medicine. In Yūho Park in Ōita stands Koga Tadao's memorial to the birth of Western medicine, set up in October 1972, showing Almeida with a Japanese assistant about to begin an operation.In Hondo, beside the Christian cemetery where the nameless faithful of the years around the Shimabara and Amakusa uprising lie, stands his statue, next to the memorial to Adam Arakawa, the islands' first martyr.At Kawaura a monument marks his landing place.
For Catholics he is something more: a layman who asked at thirty what God wanted of him, gave away a fortune to save abandoned children and heal the sick, and then gave the rest of his life to carrying the Gospel and the sacraments from harbour to harbour.