The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China by Michael Szonyi (review)

Abstract

Published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute HJAS 80.1 (2020): 278–282 available in English. Utilizing this Korean scholarship, Suh produces an engaging English-language monograph on the history of medicine in Korea. Her various attempts to make her study more original and more relevant to wider audiences should be well regarded. With regard to her great materials to think about any effort to name the local, I just want to add one reservation: Suh could have used much further particularizations because the political and intellectual diversities of her heroes, as well as the vastly different social contexts that they worked within and created, seem not fully articulated at times. For example, scholar-officials of the new dynasty of Chosŏn, who were building up the political legitimacy of Chosŏn upon their scholarship on Chinese Confucianism, had rather different relationships with foreign medical works when compared with medicine dealers under the colonial regime and professional psychiatrists and traditional medical doctors of postwar Korea. Even if we consider a single case, it is not clear whether one can call Hŏ’s and Yi’s evocations of “Eastern medicine” a similar regionalizing attempt to articulate their intellectual achievement within the Chinese medical tradition, given the vastly different East Asian worlds of the early seventeenth and the late nineteenth centuries and the different social status of Hŏ, a uniquely successful court doctor, and Yi, a well-versed yet quite unknown medical practitioner in northern Korea. We may have to go deeper in examining these particularities in order to understand these diverging practices of making medicine simultaneously more universal and more Korean.