Tanba no Yasuyori (丹波康頼)
TANBA no Yasuyori (912-995) was a physician during the Heian period. He had government posts as hari hakase (master of acupuncture), Tanba no suke (assistant governor of Tanba Province), and Saemon no suke (assistant captain of the Left Division of Outer Palace Guard).
He was from Amata-gun, Tanba Province (Fukuchiyama City) or Yada, Kuwata-gun (Kameoka City). He was of a branch of the Sakagami clan, which descended from toraijin (people from overseas) from China, and it is said that one of his forefathers was Emperor Ling (Han) of the Later Han Dynasty. The Tanba clan was the Liu Fang clan before the name change. He was an authority in oriental medicine at the time, and he edited and presented to the Imperial Court all 30 volumes of "Ishinbo" in 984. It is the oldest exisiting book of medicine in Japan, which is a comprehensive compilation of knowledge and wisdom in all fields of medicine of that time that referenced Chinese books of medicine, and it left a major mark in the history of medicine in Japan.
With this accomplishment he was given Tanba no sukune no kabane (the title of Tanba no sukune, the third rank of title ranking system), and he became the forefather of the Tanba clan, which, since then, has an uninterrupted line of physicians. The descendants successively inherited the position as tenyaku no to (the head of Tenyaku ryo, the Bureau of Medicine), and the family turned out people who were assigned to be jii (doctor for the Emperor and the Imperial family). Prominent figures include his great grandson, TANBA no Masatada, who authored "Iryakusho", Zenso YAKUIN, who served as a jii to Hideyoshi TOYOTOMI, and Genko TAKI, who was an oku ishi (inner physician, doctors who treated the Tokugawa family) of the Edo bakufu (Japanese feudal government headed by a shogun).
Keizo TANBA, a pharmacologist, and while not doctors but still of direct lineage, the father-and-son actors Tetsuro TANBA and Yoshitaka TANBA of the branch family of the Tanba family in Kamakura are also descendants.
Yasuyori lived in Shimoyada-cho, Kameoka City, and there exists 'Iodani,' a toponym according to the legend that he grew medicinal herbs there.