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Dissertation Information for So Young Suh

NAME:
- So Young Suh

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2006)

ADVISORS:
- M. Norton Wise
- Charlotte Furth

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- John B. Duncan
- Burglind Jungmann

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Korean medicine between the local and the universal: 1600--1945

Abstract: This dissertation examines how Koreans have manifested their own tradition of medicine and how these claims were modified from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. During these years, indigenous medical learning moved from defining itself in relation to a universal Chinese tradition, to a confrontation with biomedicine in the context of nationalism and colonialism, to a repositioning as an aspect of national heritage in the post colonial setting of independence after World War II. This study views the changing mode of expressing "Koreanness" within medical discourse as a culturally elaborated tool at the margins. The ways in which traditional medicine was nationalized, biomedicine was accommodated, and medical products were advertised will reveal the changing tension between locality and universality, upon which the politics of identity has unfolded.

The medical publications of the Choso n Dynasty (1392-1910) on local botanicals and Eastern medicine exhibited the ways in which the Yellow Emperor's body was adapted to Korea. Although the "locality" of the local botanicals reveals more inconsistencies than a rigid categorical rationale, the claim itself helps us understand the mode of language that was developed to accommodate a universal body of medical knowledge to a locality.

Medical reforms led by the Choso n Dynasty, the Great Han Empire (1897-1910) and the Japanese colonial government (1910-1945) regulated medical professionals, established sanitary police, and introduced biomedical hospitals and medical schools. Despite the limits and problems, those attempts to modernize Korean medicine provided new institutional settings in which knowledge on the local attributes of bodies of Koreans was produced and contested.

Korean doctors of traditional medicine, Korean doctors of biomedicine, and Japanese doctors as educators and administrators of biomedicine in Korea modified the terms of traditional medicine and utilized images of biomedicine in articulating the new relationship between the local and the universal during the early twentieth century. Furthermore, the indigenous in the commercial representation of medicine took exclusively eclectic forms in attracting consumers' attention. Advertisements for medicine inserted in major newspapers published in Korea and Manchuria demonstrate that there was no purely indigenous medicine although the idea of the "medicine of our own" was incessantly utilized by drug sellers in expanding their market under the Japanese domination.

MPACT Scores for So Young Suh

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-08-09 08:07:10

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Students under So Young Suh

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None