Hawai‘i Studies on Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019. viii, 232 pp. (Tables.) US$62.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-5545-1.
Sonja M. Kim’s book, Imperatives of Care: Women and Medicine in Colonial Korea, is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of women, medical science, education, or missionaries in late Chosŏn (1876–1910) and colonial Korea (1910–1945). Kim explains this period was particularly important because while medicine has a long-established history in Korea, biomedicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had a profound impact on how women’s bodies were newly understood, regulated, and treated. She examines changing perceptions of womanhood and public health practices vis-à-vis Korean nationalism, Japanese imperialism, and Christian evangelism through women’s experiences in “health and female education, professionalization of female medical workers, and women’s and infants’ health care and therapeutics” (15).
The book is highly engaging, and grabs the reader’s attention from the beginning with the retelling of an 1899 newspaper article about a young woman trying to enroll in medical school. Kim includes numerous vignettes throughout the book, helping the reader to build rapport with the topic. Kim has organized her book into four chapters, moving chronologically through the transition from Chosŏn to the open-ports period to colonialism, and thematically through the development of the science of hygiene and medical professions. She places the new medical knowledge and practices within the conflicting demands of different agents, and shows how Korean women were able to use this contentious space to gain agency.
In her first chapter, “Sanitizing Women and the Domestic Sciences,” Kim takes the reader through the history of female education from Chosŏn-era moral primers and practical guidebooks emphasizing the Confucian womanly virtue of pudŏk to turn-of-the-century Domestic Sciences promoting new gendered ideals which situated women as citizens whose duty was to practice wisaeng (hygiene). While some readers may get bogged down by the historical context, Kim meticulously shows how women’s physical, moral, and ethical duties developed, especially in the contest of wisaeng as framed by Christian missionaries, Korean nationalists, and the Japanese Government-General of Korea (GGK), all of whom often shared similar goals of gendered citizenship. Hyaeweol Choi’s influence on the field is evident as the foundation of Kim’s research.
The second chapter, “From the Ŭinyŏ to the Yŏŭi: The Female Physician,” says women’s roles as care-providers enabled them to become medical professionals. She examines how female medical practitioners differed from the Chosŏn-period lowborn ŭinyŏ, who had medical training but also were expected to entertain for the state, much like kisaeng entertainers. This helps to explain why early female physicians were rare and often not treated with respect.
In the third chapter, “The Heavenly Task of Nursing,” Kim looks at how the nursing profession transformed and became a popular career choice for Korean women because it was possible for a married woman to maintain both a private practice and her family. Although obstetrics and gynecology continued to grow through the twentieth century, midwifery remained commonplace through the 1960s, especially for women who wanted to give birth at home. Kim also examines the “better baby movement,” which included missionary programs for pregnant women, infants, and children, and education within the Domestic Sciences umbrella. While the GGK also wanted healthier subjects, Kim notes the government lacked resources to have a wider impact, enabling a fraught alliance between missionaries and the GGK when it came to their “shared goals of civilization” (106). She adds that Korean women gained the leadership experience that enabled them to rebuild Korean society after liberation in 1945.
The fourth chapter, “Negotiating Gynecology: Constant Imperatives, Evolving Options,” examines the changing field of gynecology and how it integrated both biomedicine and traditional medicine in formulating a new understanding of women’s diseases (puinbyŏng). Kim recounts newspaper articles, advertisements, texts, and prescriptions to provide a thorough history of the field. She contextualizes women’s diseases and birth control within the anxieties about the next generation and “the desires of the Korean patriarchal family, visions of healthy Christian families, or the needs of nationalist or imperialist mobilizations” (129). Kim adds that women—even kisaeng and other women marginalized from the Wise Mother, Good Wife ideals—were able to use the new knowledge to lead more informed, healthier lives.
As Kim remarks in the epilogue, Korean women were “cast as reproducers and health care providers of a newly conceived populace, entrusted to guard the health of themselves, their families, and other women and children” and thus women became “targets of health education, reform measures, policy making, pharmaceutical advertisements, and medical research” (138). But women continued to empower themselves to make informed decisions “in their reproductive health and child-rearing roles for considerations other than God, family, nation, or empire” (139).
Kim packs a wealth of information into this book and it is evident that she has done extensive research into missionary archives, colonial policies, and Korean publications to write this groundbreaking work. She is a thorough historian and while non-Koreanists may not understand all of the historical context, it is nonetheless important reading for anyone interested primarily in the medical history of other countries. The only shortcoming is that the second chapter on physicians seems brief at twenty-seven pages, short even for a book where the epilogue ends at page 139. While there is adequate discussion of Chosŏn female medical practitioners, more information could have been provided about the colonial period. For example, how did medical training specifically differ for women and men in Korea, and how did colonial medical schools differ from those in Japan or the United States? What other accounts by and about female physicians from print media, biographies, and perhaps even literary sources, could have been included? But perhaps Kim’s second book project will fill in some of the gaps. This book is nonetheless requisite for Koreanists of the early modern period, as well as for others interested in a comparative view of gender and medicine.
Jennifer Jung-Kim
University of California, Los Angeles, USA