Voluntary work in our hospital by women belonging to the Women's Division of the Agricultural Cooperatives Association (JA) in Nagano got started in 1973, when the hospital accepted the organized activity of the women. In the beginning, participants were mostly officials of the Women's Division, but later on, other people joined them. They formed a society of volunteers known as Aspara Kai. The voluntary activities are wide-ranging from those directly concerned with care of patients to collecting materials. They have played an important role as a bridge connecting health care to the community by telling people how things are going on in the hospital. Among the activities our hospital sponsors or supports, there are short courses in nursing care, health, mutual help and so on. Doctors and many other specialists on the hospital staff participate in these projects as volunteer lecturers. To enrich the content of these activities, we wish to join hands more tightly with the agricultural cooperatives and become a bearer of health care, medical service and welfare in the region. By carrying out our activities with a sense of unity, comprehensively and efficiently, we will be able to build a society of mutual aid.
seconds ; Hospitals ; Transection, NOS ; Human adult females ; Voluntary

Modern hospital in Korea was the space of competition and compromise among different forces such as the state power and social forces, imperialism and nationalism, and the traditional and the modern medicine. Hospital in the Japanese colonialism was the object of control for establishing the colonial medical system. Japanese colonialism controlled not only the public hospital but also the private hospital which had to possess more than 10 infectious beds in the isolation building by the Controlling Regulation of Private Hospital. In fact, the private hospital had to possess more than 20 beds for hospital management. As a result, its regulation prevented the independent development of the private hospital. But because the public hospital could not accommodate many graduates of medical school, most of them had to serve as a practitioner. Although some practitioners had more than 20 beds in their clinics, they were not officially included in the imperial medicine. By concentrating on the trend of the number of bed in the hospital, this paper differs from most previous studies of the system of hospital, which have argued that the system of hospital was converted the public-centered hospital system under the colonial medical system into the private-centered hospital system under the U. S. medical system after the Liberation in 1945. After Liberation, medical reformers discussed arranging the public and the private hospital. Lee Yong-seol, who was a Health-Welfare minister, disagreed the introduction of the system of state medicine. Worrying about the flooding of practitioners, he did not want to intervene the construction of hospital by state power. Because the private hospital run short of the medical leadership and the fundamental basis, the state still controlled the main disease in the public health and the prevention of epidemics. This means the state also played important part in the general medical examination and treatment. The outbreak of Korean War in 1950 reinforced the role of state. The leadership of the public hospital verified the trend of the quantity of bed. The number of bed in the private hospital exceeded that of the public hospital in 1966 for the first time. Furthermore, the number of bed in the public hospital doubled that of private hospital in the new general hospital of 1950s. This means the system of hospital after the Liberation was not converted the public-centered hospital system into the private-centered hospital system, but maintained the public-centered hospital system until 1960s.
Colonialism/*history ; English Abstract ; History of Medicine, 20th Cent. ; History of Medicine, 21st Cent. ; Hospitals, Public/*history ; Hospitals, Voluntary/*history ; Japan ; Korea ; United States ; War/*history

The development of life sustaining treatment technology including artificial ventilation has given us the moral problem, considering the human dignity and futility of medical treatment, until when these treatments could be given to terminally ill patients. In Korea, there were two supreme court decisions a significant impacts on the withdrawal of life sustaining treatment. After these decisions, Korean medical society has developed a guideline for advance directives and has also established a voluntary hospital ethics committee. The patient's right of self- determination right and the paternalistic approach of medicine should be balanced at an optimal level, because benefits of medical advances should be adjusted to take into account the burden of life prolongations. Decision making always has been difficult because related to ethical values, and there a broad spectrum of value-laden attitudes within Korean society. The legalization of end-of-life care should be from the respect of the professional autonomy of medical society. Under these considerations, we should supply alternative methods like hospice care, which can help to manage the withdrawal of life support appropriately, and also make an effort to relieve the economical burden of patients.
Advance Directives ; Decision Making ; Ethics Committees ; Ethics Committees, Clinical ; Hospice Care ; Hospices ; Hospitals, Voluntary ; Humans ; Jurisprudence ; Korea ; Medical Futility ; Patient Rights ; Personal Autonomy ; Personhood ; Professional Autonomy ; Societies, Medical ; Supreme Court Decisions ; Terminally Ill ; Ventilation ; Withholding Treatment