In 1986, practitioners of traditional medicine in Korea decided to change the name of the type of medicine they practiced from Hanŭi, using the Sino-Korean character for China's Han dynasty, to Hanŭi, with a different initial character pronounced the same but meaning “Korea.” This change in terminology was but one moment in the centuries-long localization of medicine on the Korean peninsula that Soyoung Suh traces in her richly researched Naming the Local: Medicine, Language, and Identity in Korea since the Fifteenth Century.
This is not a history of medicine that only explores changes in medical theory and practices. It is also a cultural history, using medicine and medicines to explore how Koreans have constructed their culture. Suh offers a persuasive narrative, showing how Koreans took medical theory and medicinal ingredients from China and, starting in the late nineteenth century, from the West and Japan as well, and modified them to fit the distinctive conditions of the Korean peninsula and the perceived needs of the Korean people, thereby producing a Korean approach to health and healing.
Suh begins in the first century of the Chosŏn dynasty with the government's encyclopedic collections of prescriptions, such as the massive Ŭibang yuch'wi (Classified compilation of medical prescriptions), which recommended the use of local ingredients whenever possible. In her second chapter, Suh shows Chosŏn Koreans moving beyond the localization of pharmacopeia to propose modifications of Chinese medical theory. She points out that Hŏ Chun (1539–1615), in his Tongŭi pogam (Precious mirror of Eastern medicine), emphasized more than most Chinese physicians did the need to promote health maintenance before illness strikes. She also introduces Yi Che-ma (1838–1900), who divided people into four physiological categories and insisted that each of those four bodily types needed different therapeutic approaches.
In her third and fourth chapters, Suh moves into the twentieth century and the period of Japanese colonial rule, a time when some Koreans began to claim that traditional medicine was more effective than Japanese-promoted and Western-derived biomedicine for Korean bodies breathing Korean air, eating Korean food, and contracting Korean diseases. At the same time, practitioners of traditional medicine began to borrow some of the language and concepts of biomedicine to dress traditional medicine in modern clothing. As early as 1897, Korean medical entrepreneurs began mass-producing patent medicines, such as “Lifesaving Water,” which were often presented as composed of Korean ingredients or intended to address uniquely Korean medical problems. They were herbal concoctions rather than medications based on biomedical ingredients, so they were examples of traditional medicine as well as of the mass-produced pharmaceuticals of modern biomedicine.
Suh pauses briefly from her narrative of the localization of traditional medicine to introduce readers to Yu Ir-han (1895–1971), an American-educated businessman who grew rich selling American-style medicines. His success, alongside the popularity of patent medicine, reveals that in the first half of the twentieth century Koreans were still torn between the appeal of the local and the desire to join the broader modern world. That tension between the local and the universal is still evident in Korea.
In her fifth chapter, Suh examines psychiatrists trained in biomedicine, joined later by practitioners of traditional medicine, who called for the recognition of hwabyŏng (“fire disease”) as a uniquely Korean manifestation of depression. Continuing a historical pattern that frames the entire book, then, in the late twentieth century biomedicine, with its normative claims of universal applicability, was joined with the local orientation of traditional medicine to promote a modern practice that addressed medical problems seen as distinctively Korean.
In crafting her argument that over the centuries Koreans have continuously worked to localize medicine originating from abroad, Suh draws on an impressive range of sources, from premodern medical encyclopedias to twentieth-century newspaper advertisements. The only weak point in this otherwise persuasive argument is that Suh is not always clear by what she means by “medicine.” In chapters 1, 3, and 4, she focuses on medicines, the ingredients in prescriptions used to treat bodily dysfunctions. However, in chapters 2 and 5, she turns her attention to medicine per se, discussing the medical theory physicians used to diagnose and identify medical problems and determine how best to treat them. It would have helped her readers if Suh had distinguished between medicine and medicines.
But that is just a quibble. Suh makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the interplay of the local and the universal in not just the history of Korean medicine but in Korean cultural history overall. Monographs on the history of science in Korea are few. Monographs that combine the history of scientific thought and practice with an examination of how Koreans engaged in the localization of science are rarer still, even in Korean. Suh has given us such a study. It may change the way one thinks about the long arc of Korean history. Anyone interested in how Korea has maintained and asserted its cultural autonomy over the centuries should read this book.
