Red Beard is up there with my favorite world cinema of all time, and is definitely my most treasured Kurasawa. It has the moral weight of Dostoevsky,with the intrepid Toshiro Mifune kicked butt and lending sage advice. I highly recommend it...if you have three hours. It's long like Russian literature too (this may be because it's based on a Dost short story).
But anyway, the plot is based out of a urban clinic and the work of two doctors amidst the poverty and suffering. They would have been working off of texts illustrated by the likes of these. Fascinating!