Korean Journal of Medical History最新文献

{"title":"Erased Alternatives, Locked-in Path: The Contestation of Medical Workforce Supply Policy in Authoritarian South Korea, 1961-1988.","authors":"Seungmann Park","doi":"10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.575","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.575","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article traces how physician supply policy was formulated and implemented during Korea's authoritarian era (1961-1988), spanning the military regime of Park Chung-hee and the New Military regime of Chun Doo-hwan. It examines several questions that have hitherto gone unexplained: the circumstances behind the initiation (1965), suspension (1971), and resumption (1978) of the founding of new medical schools; why most of these newly established schools were private; and the range of alternatives explored in lieu of building medical schools. The founding of medical schools that began in the mid-1960s was halted in 1971 amid opposition from physicians' organizations and fiscal constraints. The government then turned to familiar alternatives-qualifying examinations and four-year medical colleges-but neither bore fruit. The Community Health Practitioner system, an adaptation of MEDEX, was successfully institutionalized, yet it remained constrained by persistent skepticism toward non-physician personnel and by its inability to address the growing demand for care in cities. After these alternatives had foundered one by one, the government reverted in 1978 to expanding medical schools. Coupled with a guiding principle of minimizing state investment, this reversion culminated in a model of physician training centered on private medical schools. In short, the 1960s and 1970s were at once a period in which a policy imagination for mobilizing other kinds of personnel took shape and a critical juncture at which that imagination was erased and a single path became entrenched. By showing that today's prevailing assumption-that expanding the medical supply must mean founding new medical schools-is not inevitable but the product of a particular historical trajectory, this article draws out the significance this past holds for a present in which regional healthcare has once again become a contested issue.</p>","PeriodicalId":42441,"journal":{"name":"Korean Journal of Medical History","volume":"35 2","pages":"575-633"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13631483/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149116155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Professional Project of the Korean Pharmaceutical Association and the Pluralistic Character of South Korea's Healthcare System, 1950s-1970s.","authors":"Youngju Lee","doi":"10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.469","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.469","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the historical process through which pharmacists, organized through the Korean Pharmaceutical Association, sought to establish their professional status and social roles within South Korea's changing healthcare system from the 1950s through the 1970s. Drawing on the concept of the \"professional project,\" it analyzes a series of collective efforts through which pharmacists sought to secure their jurisdiction in the pharmaceutical market while legitimizing their professional status by demonstrating their expertise and social necessity amid competition with various healthcare actors over roles and professional boundaries. The article focuses on three cases in which this process was particularly pronounced. First, in responding to druggists' demands for the right to subdivide medicines for retail sale and patent medicine sellers' demands for elevation to druggist status in the 1950s and 1960s, the Korean Pharmaceutical Association defended pharmacists' market jurisdiction over the handling of medicines and intervened collectively in the legislative process. Second, from the late 1960s onward, through efforts to enact the School Health Act, implement the school pharmacist system, and conduct pollution surveys, the Association applied hygienic knowledge and techniques accumulated within the field of pharmacy to the emerging problem of environmental pollution and presented school health and environmental hygiene as new areas of professional activity for pharmacists. Third, as vacancies in public health center directorships in rural areas became increasingly severe in the 1970s, the Association called for expanding eligibility for these positions to multiple professions and argued that pharmacists, too, were qualified to oversee local health administration. Although these efforts did not all result in stable institutionalization, the Association identified gaps in the contemporary healthcare system as opportunities for new professional activities, linked them to pharmacists' professional roles, and accumulated experience in responding collectively to other professions and the state. By tracing these processes, this article shows that pharmacists did not merely perform roles assigned to them but actively sought to shape their own professional standing and roles amid social and institutional change. More broadly, through the activities of pharmacists, it demonstrates that South Korea's healthcare system in the 1950s-1970s constituted a pluralistic arena in which diverse actors competed over roles and jurisdictions and sought to claim new spheres of activity.</p>","PeriodicalId":42441,"journal":{"name":"Korean Journal of Medical History","volume":"35 2","pages":"469-501"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13631478/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149116116","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Treatment of Diseases in the Civil Society of the Han Empire.","authors":"Hooki Min","doi":"10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.689","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.689","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The separation of medicine and shamanism, which began during the Spring and Autumn Period, led to the emergence of \"excellent physicians\" who were distinct from shamans, a trend that continued from the Warring States Period through the early Han Dynasty. However, while there were some instances of these highly skilled physicians treating commoners, their medical practice was primarily concentrated among the ruling elite-including rulers, high-ranking officials, and those associated with them. Furthermore, physicians with outstanding treatment records in the general populace were sought after by the imperial court, the central government, feudal lords, and local administrative offices; many excellent physicians consequently flocked to the capital, Chang'an, or regional centers, where they were offered substantial compensation. Consequently, patients in the grassroots of society, who found it difficult to receive treatment from these skilled physicians, had no choice but to rely on shamans for their medical care. Folk healers served, on the one hand, as shamans and priests, and on the other, as practitioners who treated common ailments through methods such as acupuncture and herbal medicine. The state, too, dispatched physicians from the imperial court or local administrative offices to the general public to provide relief during special circumstances, such as the outbreak of infectious diseases. During the Han Dynasty, those who supplied medicinal herbs for the treatment of illnesses in civilian society included the \"mu-ui\" and recluses documented in historical records, as well as anonymous herb gatherers not mentioned in those records. They supplied civilian society with approximately 130 types of herbal medicines, including ginseng, as evidenced by the herbal records unearthed to date. A significant number of them possessed medical knowledge and helped treat the common people's illnesses. Furthermore, while it was relatively easy to obtain medicinal herbs in the capital, Chang'an, or in provincial centers, the farther one traveled from these areas, the more difficult it became to procure them, and their prices were often beyond the means of ordinary people. Furthermore, at that time, many people believed that illness was \"a calamity brought on by spirits,\" and for them, treating an illness meant driving out spirits and evil entities. Consequently, incantations performed by shamans were widely practiced as a method of healing and, taking the form of sympathetic magic, even extended to natural objects. The common people of that era also actively engaged in magical healing through methods such as \"chukyu.\"</p>","PeriodicalId":42441,"journal":{"name":"Korean Journal of Medical History","volume":"35 2","pages":"689-730"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13631480/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149116302","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Circulation of Song Hejijufang Prescriptions as Nabyak - Focused on Uwhangcheongsimwon.","authors":"Xingyu Li","doi":"10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.1","DOIUrl":"10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.1","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This study analyzes the influence of the \"Taipinghuiminhejijufang\" (hereafter \"Hejijufang\"), an official Song Dynasty medical text, on the formation of Joseon's Nabyak (year-end medicine) and examines the bidirectional nature of Korea-China medical exchange and the circular process of knowledge. This study confirms that the prescriptions in \"Nabyakjeungchibang\" and \"Eonhaenabyakjeungchibang\", which were specialized medical books on Joseon's Nabyak, originated from the original Nabyak prescriptions of \"Hejijufang\". This research examines the localization of these original prescriptions across two dimensions: textual knowledge and social function. Regarding textual knowledge, Joseon medical texts exhibited a \"standardization reliance\" on Chinese medical techniques while simultaneously pursuing a \"regional reconstruction\" of medical terminology. In terms of social function, Uwhangcheongsimwon and Sohaphyangwon -- universal medicines for treating Feng and Qi disorders -- performed multifaceted roles in Joseon as emergency medicines, imperial gifts, and relief supplies. Furthermore, the study tracks the case of Uwhangcheongsimwon, where Joseonized knowledge was converted into material form and reintroduced to China. The treasurization of the Joseon Uwhangcheongsimwon in the Qing Dynasty was preceded by the decline in authority of the original \"Hejijufang\" version within China. Against this backdrop, Joseon-manufactured Uwhangcheongsimwon entered China through diplomatic envoys and became extensively popular. The factors behind the treasurization of Joseon Uwhangcheongsimwon are as follows: First, its material superiority characterized by outstanding efficacy and high-quality authentic medicinal herbs -- Joseon's ginseng and bezoar. Second, the psychological tendencies of \"valuing the distant over the near\" and \"preferring the expensive over the cheap\" endowed the Joseon medicine with a sense of mystery. Third, attendants of diplomatic envoys sold counterfeit pills, which paradoxically maximized the craving for authentic Joseon products. In conclusion, the acceptation, reverse inflow, and treasurization of \"Hejijufang\" prescriptions represent a large-scale practice of the \"comigration of knowledge and material\", showing how knowledge that acquired locality in a new space (Joseon) flows back to its original space (China) in the form of material (patented medicine). This vividly proves that medical exchange between Korea and China was not a one-way dissemination from China to Joseon, but a process of creative transformation and mutual circulation.</p>","PeriodicalId":42441,"journal":{"name":"Korean Journal of Medical History","volume":"35 1","pages":"1-40"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13216672/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148036235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Study on the Operation and Institutional Character of the Chemulpo Women's Dispensary.","authors":"Minkee Hong","doi":"10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.41","DOIUrl":"10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.41","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This study examines the establishment and operation of the Chemulpo Women's Dispensary to clarify the patterns and historical character of women's medical work in Incheon during the Japanese colonial period. Previous studies have made only fragmentary references to the fact that the dispensary was founded in 1921 by Rosetta S. Hall, without sufficiently addressing its practical operations or its relationship with the local community. The findings reveal that the Chemulpo Women's Dispensary functioned not merely as an outcome of missionary expansion, but as a regional medical hub that filled a critical gap in specialised healthcare for women and children in colonial Incheon, where public hospitals were largely oriented towards the Japanese population. Its daily operations were not unilaterally directed by Western missionaries; rather, they were sustained through the continuous participation and medical practice of Korean female physicians. This process was closely connected to the formation of women's social roles as modern medical professionals. Furthermore, the dispensary expanded its activities beyond general outpatient care to include infant welfare, prenatal care, itinerant medical services, and hygiene education, thereby promoting public health awareness and preventative medicine within the local community. Its institutional growth during the colonial period was underpinned by close collaboration with the Methodist Church, particularly through the organisation of support committees and the deployment of Bible Women, which together facilitated the construction of local networks of care. Although the dispensary's formal operations were suspended under Japanese repression in the 1940s, it was reopened after liberation and has maintained historical continuity as the Incheon Christian Hospital. By examining the case of the Chemulpo Women's Dispensary, this study elucidates the localisation of Christian women's medical institutions and contributes to broadening regional perspectives within the historiography of modern Korean medicine and the history of women's medicine.</p>","PeriodicalId":42441,"journal":{"name":"Korean Journal of Medical History","volume":"35 1","pages":"41-76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13216668/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148036255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Thomas Morgan and a Heat-Based Variety of Newtonian Medicine.","authors":"Euidon Joo","doi":"10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.253","DOIUrl":"10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.253","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines Thomas Morgan's medical ideas in the context of Newtonian iatromechanism in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Britain. In existing historiography, Morgan has been studied as a deist, but his medical writings have received little attention. In fact, Morgan has been classified as a Newtonian iatromechanist, but viewed as a minor figure in comparison with other Newtonians such as Archibald Pitcairne, George Cheyne, and James Keill. Such an assessment is partly due to the fact that Morgan did not have a social connection with Isaac Newton while others did, but also because Morgan's medical writing has been considered second-class and largely repeating earlier Newtonian works. However, close examination shows that though Morgan shared some common grounds with his predecessors, he developed original interpretations in many areas. Just like Pitcairne and his followers, Morgan looked upon an animal body as a complicated living machine whose life lay in the proper circulation of blood and other fluids through the small pipes distributed throughout the body. However, Morgan differed in that he, more than others, saw heat as an important factor in physiology. He thought that fire was condensed light and that the subtle substance of elementary fire was diffused through the universe. Heated air, or the air containing elementary fire breathed in acted as an expansive force to counterbalance the attractive forces between small particles in the animal body. According to Morgan, fever, which was considered a distinct disease at the time, was caused when the heated air in the blood was not properly evacuated or when the warmed body fluids were not cooled down. Morgan also argued that the main agent of digestion was the heat operating in the stomach. His heat-based interpretation was novel but fitted into the existing understanding of physical matters including the animal body, and it provided explanation about some physiological phenomena which were not fully explained before. The explanatory power of Morgan's medical writing earned him a good reputation as a physician among his contemporaries. In the context of the transition from iatromechanism to vitalism, part of Morgan's heat-based physiology may be considered as contributing to the shift, by proposing that the capacity to maintain body heat - that is, the ability to absorb, retain, and emit elementary fire and air - belonged solely to the living body.</p>","PeriodicalId":42441,"journal":{"name":"Korean Journal of Medical History","volume":"35 1","pages":"253-300"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13216671/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148036308","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Development of Psychoanalytic Research in the Department of Neuropsychiatry at Keijo Imperial University: Psychiatry in the Japanese Empire.","authors":"Gieop Moon","doi":"10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.77","DOIUrl":"10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.77","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This study examines the reception and eventual decline of psychoanalysis, which remained outside the psychiatric mainstream in prewar Japan, in the Department of Neuropsychiatry at Keijo Imperial University. It traces the scholarly formation of Kubo Kiyoji, who led the department, and the development of psychoanalytic research within the department. It focuses on the personal and intellectual networks of Japanese psychiatry and on Keijo Imperial University's position within the academic hierarchy. Kubo encountered psychoanalysis through Eugen Bleuler, director of the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, while studying in Zurich. This exposure provided him with an intellectual framework distinct from the German psychiatry tradition that was dominant in Japanese psychiatry. Consequently, the research output of the Department of Neuropsychiatry at Keijo Imperial University reflected Kubo's interests. The department produced articles introducing psychoanalytic theory and clinical case reports through the early 1930s. At the same time, Kubo adopted psychoanalytic theory eclectically rather than embracing it in its entirety, similar to Bleuler, who had maintained a cautious distance from Freud since the mid-1910s. Furthermore, Japanese psychiatry was shaped by a hierarchical structure centered on Kure Shuzo, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, within which psychoanalysis remained non-mainstream. Under these conditions, psychoanalytic research at Keijo Imperial University did not become a sustained departmental program and did not develop into sustained collaboration with Tohoku Imperial University, where psychoanalysis was actively pursued. Instead, the department's research gradually shifted toward somatic therapies and other fields with more visible findings, a shift better suited to the department's academic position. Consequently, the discontinuation of psychoanalytic research at Keijo Imperial University was not simply the result of a change in Kubo's personal interests. Rather, it reflected the structural conditions under which Keijo, as a peripheral imperial university, had to concentrate its resources on research fields more favorable to securing academic prestige. By tracing this case, this study suggests that research in the medical faculty of Keijo Imperial University was affected not only by the personal and intellectual networks of medicine in the Japanese Empire, but also by Keijo's position as a peripheral imperial university.</p>","PeriodicalId":42441,"journal":{"name":"Korean Journal of Medical History","volume":"35 1","pages":"77-112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13216674/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148036185","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Insecticide to Vaccination?: The History of Japanese Encephalitis Research and Control in South Korea.","authors":"Heesoo Cho, Dahye Jeong","doi":"10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.113","DOIUrl":"10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.113","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the history of Japanese encephalitis (JE) research and disease control in South Korea from the post-liberation era through the 1990s, focusing on the gap between the accumulation of scientific knowledge and its translation into effective public health policy. Drawing on epidemiological reports, government documents, medical journals, and newspaper sources, this study analyzes three interconnected dimensions of Korea's JE history. First, it traces how knowledge about JE was produced through transnational networks-including U.S. military medical laboratories, the World Health Organization's malaria eradication program, and Korean scientists trained abroad. As such, this body of knowledge was externally structured, rather than through an independent domestic research infrastructure, and thus it failed to translate consistently into government prevention policy. Second, this study examines how DDT-centered vector control became the principal instrument of JE prevention, and how the repeated limitations of insecticide-based interventions helped produce a discourse that attributed outbreaks to rural backwardness. This narrative deflected attention from the structural deficiencies of the prevention system itself. Finally, this study shows that vaccination-long anticipated as the solution to JE-also faced its own institutional obstacles. The failure to secure adequate funding, the privatization of vaccine production, the shift to fee-based individual vaccination, and the absence of mandatory vaccination requirements collectively delayed stable preventive coverage until the mid-1980s, when rising vaccination rates finally produced a sustained decline in JE incidence. Taken together, this history demonstrates that the management of JE in modern Korea was shaped less by the availability of scientific knowledge or biomedical technology than by the presence or absence of the institutional foundations necessary to operationalize it.</p>","PeriodicalId":42441,"journal":{"name":"Korean Journal of Medical History","volume":"35 1","pages":"113-149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13216675/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148036205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Making of the Mental Health System in South Korea, 1960s-1980s: The Rise of Institutionalization and the Unfulfilled Promise of Community Mental Health.","authors":"Kihoon You","doi":"10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.151","DOIUrl":"10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.151","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In recent years, growing attention to the social integration of persons with psychosocial disabilities into their local communities has intensified calls to shift Korea's hospital-centered mental health system toward a community-based model. Historically, the Korean mental health system has often been framed through the narrative of a \"delayed transition,\" which suggests that the country is belatedly undergoing the deinstitutionalization experienced in Western societies during the 1960s and 1970s. However, this linear account fails to explain a crucial divergence: during the very decades when deinstitutionalization was being debated and implemented in several Western countries, Korea was rapidly expanding its psychiatric institutions and hospital beds, entrenching a long-term institutional regime. This article reexamines the 1960s through the 1980s as a critical juncture in the formation of Korea's mental health system by tracing the debates and strategic interactions among the state, the psychiatric profession, and civil society surrounding the enactment of the Mental Health Act. During the 1960s and 1970s, authoritarian regimes adopted a social defense framework that cast people with mental illness as potential threats, thereby legitimizing a system of confinement. The 1983 \"prayer house\" (gidowon) scandal, however, publicly exposed the realities of institutionalization and briefly opened a window for communitybased alternatives within the psychiatric profession. The Korean Neuropsychiatric Association adopted community mental health as its official orientation, and in the mid-1980s a community mental health project was carried out on Ganghwa Island. Yet this opening was foreclosed by a convergence of countervailing forces: As the legislative process leading to the 1985 Mental Health Act became structured around a dichotomy between psychiatric nursing homes and hospitals, the psychiatric profession pursued a strategy of transition \"from facilities to hospitals,\" thereby consolidating an admission-centered system. This strategy aligned with state interests in expanding hospital beds for purposes of social defense while simultaneously curtailing public welfare expenditure. At the same time, the expansion of health insurance and medical aid programs in the 1980s increased service utilization, creating economic incentives for further growth in psychiatric beds. Meanwhile, civil society's human rights discourse emerged as an extension of resistance to the authoritarian regime and focused on procedural safeguards against involuntary hospitalization; however, it did not lead to a fundamental reconfiguration of the confinement-centered system itself. Rather than reducing the formation of the Korean mental health system to a problem of developmental delay-often framed as a \"fifty-year gap with the West\"-this study highlights the multiple possibilities and alternative trajectories embedded in its history and invites a historically grounded rethinki","PeriodicalId":42441,"journal":{"name":"Korean Journal of Medical History","volume":"35 1","pages":"151-216"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13216673/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148036370","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hiro Fujimoto, Aya Homei, and Ellen Gardner Nakamura, eds., Medical Women in the Japanese Empire: Sources and Critique (London: Taylor & Francis, 2025).","authors":"Jiyoung Park","doi":"10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.301","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13081/kjmh.2026.35.301","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This review examines Medical Women in the Japanese Empire: Sources and Critique (2025), edited by Hiro Fujimoto, Aya Homei, and Ellen Gardner Nakamura, situating it within the recent historiography on gender and medicine in East Asia. The volume explores how women entered and developed careers in a wide range of health-related professions across the Japanese Empire, drawing on a broad geographical scope that includes Japan, its colonies, and adjacent regions. Rather than offering a fixed definition, the editors employ the flexible category of \"medical women,\" foregrounding a diverse set of actors and practices. A central contribution of the book lies in its source-oriented structure, which combines translated primary materials with contextual commentaries. This approach facilitates access to multilingual archives while emphasizing the recovery of individual voices, thereby aligning with oral and biographical methodologies in the history of medicine. The volume proposes three analytical axes-femininity as a double-edged construct, marginality and mobility, and family background-as key factors shaping women's professional trajectories. Through a range of case studies, these concepts are not only applied but also complicated, revealing internal tensions and the limits of existing interpretive frameworks. This review argues that the book's significance lies in their elaboration through case studies and in the methodological insights that emerge from this process. At the same time, it identifies several limitations, including the underdeveloped conceptualization of \"medical women,\" the uneven applicability of femininity across different professions, and the absence of Christian medical missions as a crucial factor in the training of female practitioners in East Asia. Despite these shortcomings, the volume offers a productive framework for reinterpreting existing scholarship and suggests new directions for the study of women, medicine, and empire in the region.</p>","PeriodicalId":42441,"journal":{"name":"Korean Journal of Medical History","volume":"35 1","pages":"301-312"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148036272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}