AHA Session 221
Saturday, January 7, 2023: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Room 405 (Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, 4th Floor)
Chair:
James Flowers, Kyung Hee University
Papers:
Comment:
The Audience
Session Abstract
This panel questions the presentist analysis that characterizes much of the historiography of medicine in East Asia. Including papers on medicine in Korea, China, Japan, and Taiwan, as well as one paper on East Asian medicine as a whole, the panel’s theme tackles the issue of presentism in at least three aspects. Firstly, it questions predominant theoretical methodologies in the scholarship. Secondly, the panel papers question the teleological narrative that traces medicine in China and Japan progressing to modernity. Thirdly, the panel questions the presentism that privileges China as the key determinant in the history of medicine in East Asia. Scholars have shown how colonialism marginalized, distorted, and sometimes destroyed traditional medical practices on a global scale. The hegemony of biomedicine remains implicit in these analyses. Scholars have also shown how Chinese medicine has survived in modern-day China, albeit in a truncated or sometimes biomedicalized form. This panel broadens the scope of the debate by illuminating the inextricably linked roles of Korea and Taiwan in understanding traditional medicine in China. Thus, the panel also flips upside down the role of colonialism in Asia. If medicine was an important means by which colonial powers asserted political and ideological control in Asia, then, as this panel argues, medicine was also an important area in which people in East Asia asserted their own agency and steered their own distinct paths to modernity. The primacy of the state in China that paints Traditional Chinese Medicine as modern has meant privileging a type of Vesalian view of the body. In the urge to be modern, China is assumed as the template with its outsized geopolitical importance and in the way that historians of China dominate the field of East Asian medicine. Brian Hsieh questions the presentism that aims to claim that Chinese doctors in the early modern period also privileged the physicality of the body. Kim Taewoo proposes a new term ontological presentism with which to argue for historians rethinking how we understand earlier historical periods. The shadow of the old Japanese Empire, specifically Korea and Taiwan, on medicine in China, largely remains a taboo topic even for scholars. Thus, in the historiography, the debate remains focused on China, and sometimes Japan. This panel shows that doctors in Korea and Taiwan did not regard themselves as peripheral to China. Rather, they were the center of their own world and continued to be active in knowledge production. Questioning the Sinocentric origin story of how East Asian medicine survived in the twentieth century, the panel illuminates the twin shadows of Japan-ruled Korea and Taiwan, in the first half of the twentieth century. Ling-yi Tsai shows that Han medicine doctors in Taiwan tracked their own path to medical modernity while James Flowers makes a similar argument for Korea.
In sum, two papers make interventions that challenge assumptions in methodology in the history of medicine in China and East Asia, while two papers feature specific case studies of medicine in Taiwan and Korea respectively.
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