2016-2017 Korean Studies Lecture Series
Medicine as Moral Practice in Chosŏn Korea

Dr. Sonja M. Kim
Associate Professor, SUNY Binghamton

Date & Time: 6 Apr 2017 (Thu) 4:30-6:00 pm
Venue: Room 4.34, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Abstract
Situating Korea’s modern transformations in public health and medicine in a longer history, this presentation explores the ways moral imperatives informed the Chosŏn, Taehan, and Japanese colonial states’ health administration, motivated medical studies and professionalization among individuals, and shaped people’s expectations and desires for medical services in the early 20th century. In particular, how Sino-classical values of benevolent governance and filiality took new shape through the modernist language of hygiene, Christian charity, and Japanese assimilation will be examined through various vignettes.

Bio:
Sonja M. Kim is an Associate Professor of Asian and Asian American at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Her research focuses on gender, health, and medicine in Korean and East Asian studies. Her monograph The Imperatives of Care: Women and Medicine in Colonial Korea is forthcoming with the University of Hawai’i Press. She is also currently co-editing a volume on medicine, science, and technology in modern Korea.