The Korean Roots of the Eastern Medicine Renaissance in East Asia

While doctors in Europe and North America had mostly discarded their traditional Galenic medical practices by the beginning of the twentieth century, Western colonial rule in most of Asia marginalized or destroyed much local medical practice. The historiography tells us that China acts as a special case due to its retention of traditional medicine, mostly through the aegis of doctors' epistemological accommodation with the state. This paper argues instead that the phenomenon of traditional medicine's survival medicine in East Asia only make sense if we recover the role of Korea and Japan. Focusing on doctors and intellectuals in Korea in the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945), I argue that they ed in imagining and East Asian modernity that placed medicine at the core. With the formal end of the Confucian examination system, unlike in China, substantial numbers of Korean intellectuals turned to medicine as the essence of East Asian knowledge production. For scholar/physicians such as Soo-kok (1855-1923), medicine became a form of political and social activism, determined to create their own knowledge systems, avoiding marginalization by the new Western knowledge. At the heart of medical theory and practice lay a set of related cosmological frameworks that sought to fuse Confucianism and Daoism with local new religions. Common to these religious movements and the resurgent Eastern-medicine doctors argued for the use of modern media, such as newspapers and radio, the Eastern-medicine doctors persuaded Japanese officialdom of the value of Eastern knowledge. In short, this paper shows that the Medicine Renaissance in East Asia began in Korea, not China.