Imperatives of Care: Women and Medicine in Colonial Korea by Sonja Kim (review)

Bridging Korean Studies and the History of Medicine

Opening with a vignette from a newspaper, Cheguk sinmun, Sonja Kim’s Imperatives of Care takes up a female candidate for medical education at the close of the nineteenth century mobilizing her circumstances within a public forum. As reported, the female applicant receives a denial from authorities in charge of the Government Medical School, but the newspaper’s recounting of her ambitions praises the attempt, leaving space for further discussion (1). For Kim, this 1899 incident represents a small subset of a series of events within late Chosŏn-period Korea, offering a means of entry into a larger discussion. Not only were Koreans increasingly invested in questions of reform and modernity, broadly construed—indeed, the import of new technologies, ideas, and the corresponding role of print as a venue for their dissemination has informed a good deal of literature within Korean Studies—but also Korean women, specifically, played a prominent role in driving this activity. The perceived “special relationship” between arriving missionaries and the Koreans with whom they interacted therefore provides a personal dynamic to focus this set of questions, especially concerning emerging roles for women, whether in terms of domestic or professional opportunities.¹

By framing her set of questions in this fashion, Kim locates her Korean actors at the intersection of two major issues: improving the health of the population and the corresponding problem of enabling women to acquire new skills, thereby contributing to and participating actively in society. By addressing these issues as related, the ensuing text takes up the question of medical education in the Chosŏn and colonial periods, while also hinting ahead to the post-colonial legacy, especially for issues like family planning.² In a tightly contained four chapters, Kim narrates the initial foray into the domestic sciences and the increasing interest to follow, exploring growing professional opportunities within medical education and various fields: the female physician, the nurse, and the nascent field of gynecology. In conversation with the field of history of medicine/the body in Korea (Soyoung Suh, Theodore Jun Yoo, Jin-Kyung Park, Eunjung Kim), the volume equally engages with questions of modernity and colonial labor practices, in this respect, echoing some of the questions previously raised by Kyung Moon Hwang’s Rationalizing Korea.

If Hwang’s project concerns the Chosŏn state and the establishment of a fully functioning bureaucracy prior to the colonial counterpart, Kim’s concern has less to do with reinforcing priority and more to do with placing gender in conversation with the question of medical modernity between the late nineteenth century and early to mid-1930s. This second question, effectively linking material and technical change, modernization, and Korean agency—the Taehan period has been a concern of historians for more than two decades now, especially at UCLA—allows Kim a forum through which to explore a rich, if consciously restrained, contribution, capturing the inner world of the first cohorts of Korean female medical professionals (midwives, nurses, and doctors), and the types of health problems they confronted most frequently.³ As noted previously, these actors often trained with missionaries, and this additional thread forms the second major historiographical tradition from which the volume derives, building especially upon the work of Hyaeweol Choi, among others.⁴

Collectively, these emerging groups of medical professionals found themselves not simply in a dialogue, but embedded in a more complicated three-way relationship, which the volume characterizes in terms of “Korean nationalism, Japanese imperialism, and Christian mission evangelism” (10), thus setting up the prospect of oppositions, or at least, a diverse spectrum encompassing possibility and constraint. In other words, the expectations of gender permitted new conversations and professional opportunities through pedagogy, even as these same concerns also served to shape and bound women’s roles. By the 1930s, for example, the debates taking place over reproduction began to increasingly reflect a pro-natalist agenda, one linked to...