Sonja M. Kim, Imperatives of Care: Women and Medicine in Colonial Korea

Imperatives of Care integrates years of Sonja Kim’s research on gender and medicine in colonial Korea, but it is more than a mere collection of past works. Kim rewrites her dissertation and articles, develops new themes, and places them in a coherent conceptual framework. Dealing with diverse topics, including the emergence of domestic sciences, the professionalizations of female medical workers, and women’s and infants’ health care, she claims that the shift in the role of women brought about the reconfiguration of Korea’s medical regime as a whole in the period from the Taehan Empire through Japanese colonial rule. Women’s duty to care for the health of others and themselves gradually extended beyond their families toward larger communities. These expanding responsibilities had consequences for novel care systems in homes, hospitals, and public health settings. By tracing Korean women’s medical experiences, the book invites us to reconsider the links between gender and medicine in modern Korea. In terms of gender studies, the book shows how science and medicine refashioned gendered roles in modern Korea. Recent scholarship on Korean gender studies has investigated modern changes in the role of women expressed in the emergence of the phrase “wise mother, good wife,”which attributed maternalistic duties to women, and the effects of science and medicine on those changes. Based on these observations, Kim argues for the centrality of medicine and science in constructing women’s maternalistic roles. Science and medicine offered the standards and guidelines for women to perform the tasks of mothers and housewives, thereby shaping the social expectations for women to keep house, support their husbands, serve their parents, and raise their children to the best of their capacities. With respect to medical history, the book displays how modern Korean medicine had gendered contours, relying on Korean scholarship on medical history accumulated over the last three decades, especially the growing corpus of research on