This article examines the history of Japanese encephalitis (JE) research and disease control in South Korea from the post-liberation era through the 1990s, focusing on the gap between the accumulation of scientific knowledge and its translation into effective public health policy. Drawing on epidemiological reports, government documents, medical journals, and newspaper sources, this study analyzes three interconnected dimensions of Korea’s JE history. First, it traces how knowledge about JE was produced through transnational networks—including U.S. military medical laboratories, the World Health Organization’s malaria eradication program, and Korean scientists trained abroad. As such, this body of knowledge was externally structured, rather than through an independent domestic research infrastructure, and thus it failed to translate consistently into government prevention policy. Second, this study examines how DDT-centered vector control became the principal instrument of JE prevention, and how the repeated limitations of insecticide-based interventions helped produce a discourse that attributed outbreaks to rural backwardness. This narrative deflected attention from the structural deficiencies of the prevention system itself. Finally, this study shows that vaccination—long anticipated as the solution to JE—also faced its own institutional obstacles. The failure to secure adequate funding, the privatization of vaccine production, the shift to fee-based individual vaccination, and the absence of mandatory vaccination requirements collectively delayed stable preventive coverage until the mid-1980s, when rising vaccination rates finally produced a sustained decline in JE incidence. Taken together, this history demonstrates that the management of JE in modern Korea was shaped less by the availability of scientific knowledge or biomedical technology than by the presence or absence of the institutional foundations necessary to operationalize it.

This study examines the establishment and operation of the Chemulpo Women’s Dispensary to clarify the patterns and historical character of women’s medical work in Incheon during the Japanese colonial period. Previous studies have made only fragmentary references to the fact that the dispensary was founded in 1921 by Rosetta S. Hall, without sufficiently addressing its practical operations or its relationship with the local community.
The findings reveal that the Chemulpo Women’s Dispensary functioned not merely as an outcome of missionary expansion, but as a regional medical hub that filled a critical gap in specialised healthcare for women and children in colonial Incheon, where public hospitals were largely oriented towards the Japanese population. Its daily operations were not unilaterally directed by Western missionaries; rather, they were sustained through the continuous participation and medical practice of Korean female physicians. This process was closely connected to the formation of women’s social roles as modern medical professionals. Furthermore, the dispensary expanded its activities beyond general outpatient care to include infant welfare, prenatal care, itinerant medical services, and hygiene education, thereby promoting public health awareness and preventative medicine within the local community. Its institutional growth during the colonial period was underpinned by close collaboration with the Methodist Church, particularly through the organisation of support committees and the deployment of Bible Women, which together facilitated the construction of local networks of care.
Although the dispensary’s formal operations were suspended under Japanese repression in the 1940s, it was reopened after liberation and has maintained historical continuity as the Incheon Christian Hospital. By examining the case of the Chemulpo Women’s Dispensary, this study elucidates the localisation of Christian women’s medical institutions and contributes to broadening regional perspectives within the historiography of modern Korean medicine and the history of women’s medicine.

This review examines Medical Women in the Japanese Empire: Sources and Critique (2025), edited by Hiro Fujimoto, Aya Homei, and Ellen Gardner Nakamura, situating it within the recent historiography on gender and medicine in East Asia. The volume explores how women entered and developed careers in a wide range of health-related professions across the Japanese Empire, drawing on a broad geographical scope that includes Japan, its colonies, and adjacent regions. Rather than offering a fixed definition, the editors employ the flexible category of “medical women,” foregrounding a diverse set of actors and practices.
A central contribution of the book lies in its source-oriented structure, which combines translated primary materials with contextual commentaries. This approach facilitates access to multilingual archives while emphasizing the recovery of individual voices, thereby aligning with oral and biographical methodologies in the history of medicine. The volume proposes three analytical axes—femininity as a double-edged construct, marginality and mobility, and family background—as key factors shaping women’s professional trajectories. Through a range of case studies, these concepts are not only applied but also complicated, revealing internal tensions and the limits of existing interpretive frameworks.
This review argues that the book’s significance lies in their elaboration through case studies and in the methodological insights that emerge from this process. At the same time, it identifies several limitations, including the underdeveloped conceptualization of “medical women,” the uneven applicability of femininity across different professions, and the absence of Christian medical missions as a crucial factor in the training of female practitioners in East Asia. Despite these shortcomings, the volume offers a productive framework for reinterpreting existing scholarship and suggests new directions for the study of women, medicine, and empire in the region.

In recent years, growing attention to the social integration of persons with psychosocial disabilities into their local communities has intensified calls to shift Korea’s hospital-centered mental health system toward a community-based model. Historically, the Korean mental health system has often been framed through the narrative of a “delayed transition,” which suggests that the country is belatedly undergoing the deinstitutionalization experienced in Western societies during the 1960s and 1970s. However, this linear account fails to explain a crucial divergence: during the very decades when deinstitutionalization was being debated and implemented in several Western countries, Korea was rapidly expanding its psychiatric institutions and hospital beds, entrenching a long-term institutional regime.
This article reexamines the 1960s through the 1980s as a critical juncture in the formation of Korea’s mental health system by tracing the debates and strategic interactions among the state, the psychiatric profession, and civil society surrounding the enactment of the Mental Health Act. During the 1960s and 1970s, authoritarian regimes adopted a social defense framework that cast people with mental illness as potential threats, thereby legitimizing a system of confinement. The 1983 “prayer house” (gidowon) scandal, however, publicly exposed the realities of institutionalization and briefly opened a window for communitybased alternatives within the psychiatric profession. The Korean Neuropsychiatric Association adopted community mental health as its official orientation, and in the mid-1980s a community mental health project was carried out on Ganghwa Island.
Yet this opening was foreclosed by a convergence of countervailing forces: As the legislative process leading to the 1985 Mental Health Act became structured around a dichotomy between psychiatric nursing homes and hospitals, the psychiatric profession pursued a strategy of transition “from facilities to hospitals,” thereby consolidating an admission-centered system. This strategy aligned with state interests in expanding hospital beds for purposes of social defense while simultaneously curtailing public welfare expenditure. At the same time, the expansion of health insurance and medical aid programs in the 1980s increased service utilization, creating economic incentives for further growth in psychiatric beds. Meanwhile, civil society’s human rights discourse emerged as an extension of resistance to the authoritarian regime and focused on procedural safeguards against involuntary hospitalization; however, it did not lead to a fundamental reconfiguration of the confinement-centered system itself.
Rather than reducing the formation of the Korean mental health system to a problem of developmental delay—often framed as a “fifty-year gap with the West”—this study highlights the multiple possibilities and alternative trajectories embedded in its history and invites a historically grounded rethinking of the current Korean mental health system.

This article critically reconsiders existing explanations for the adoption of “German medicine” in early Meiji Japan and reconstructs the institutional and political context of that decision by focusing on Sagara Chian’s conception of medical authority (iken) and his project of medical professionalization. Previous studies have explained the shift largely in terms of the academic superiority of German medicine, the German provenance of Dutch-learning medical texts, the advice of foreign advisers such as Verbeck and Bauduin, political or ideological affinity between Japan and Prussia, or factional conflict surrounding William Willis. Yet these explanations do not sufficiently clarify why the final outcome took the form of a German-style institutional model combining university-based medical education, state examinations and licensure, a hierarchical professorial order, and state regulation of medical practice. This article first shows that, in the aftermath of the Boshin War, the British model represented by William Willis enjoyed strong political legitimacy within the new Meiji government. It then traces the appointments of Sagara Chian and Iwasa Jun, the proposal and collapse of the dual-employment proposal, and the subsequent politics of separation and compromise, arguing that the crucial issue was not a simple confrontation between pro-British and pro-German camps but a contest over who would control medical education, institutional design, and the authority to certify physicians. It further demonstrates that Sagara understood “Germany” not as a repository of superior medical techniques but as an institutional model linking the university, state licensure, hierarchical academic authority, military medicine, and hygienic administration. In this light, the adoption of “German medicine” in early Meiji Japan is best understood less as passive reception of a purportedly superior foreign medicine than as an institutional choice through which the modern Japanese state sought to reorganize physicians into a state-managed and state-certified profession. This reinterpretation sheds light not only on the formation of the Meiji state and its professional order but also on the broader genealogy of modern medical education in East Asia, including colonial Korea.

This study analyzes the influence of the “Taipinghuiminhejijufang” (hereafter “Hejijufang”), an official Song Dynasty medical text, on the formation of Joseon’s Nabyak (year-end medicine) and examines the bidirectional nature of Korea-China medical exchange and the circular process of knowledge. This study confirms that the prescriptions in “Nabyakjeungchibang” and “Eonhaenabyakjeungchibang”, which were specialized medical books on Joseon’s Nabyak, originated from the original Nabyak prescriptions of “Hejijufang”.
This research examines the localization of these original prescriptions across two dimensions: textual knowledge and social function. Regarding textual knowledge, Joseon medical texts exhibited a “standardization reliance” on Chinese medical techniques while simultaneously pursuing a “regional reconstruction” of medical terminology. In terms of social function, Uwhangcheongsimwon and Sohaphyangwon -- universal medicines for treating Feng and Qi disorders -- performed multifaceted roles in Joseon as emergency medicines, imperial gifts, and relief supplies.
Furthermore, the study tracks the case of Uwhangcheongsimwon, where Joseonized knowledge was converted into material form and reintroduced to China. The treasurization of the Joseon Uwhangcheongsimwon in the Qing Dynasty was preceded by the decline in authority of the original “Hejijufang” version within China. Against this backdrop, Joseon-manufactured Uwhangcheongsimwon entered China through diplomatic envoys and became extensively popular.
The factors behind the treasurization of Joseon Uwhangcheongsimwon are as follows: First, its material superiority characterized by outstanding efficacy and high-quality authentic medicinal herbs -- Joseon’s ginseng and bezoar. Second, the psychological tendencies of “valuing the distant over the near” and “preferring the expensive over the cheap” endowed the Joseon medicine with a sense of mystery. Third, attendants of diplomatic envoys sold counterfeit pills, which paradoxically maximized the craving for authentic Joseon products.
In conclusion, the acceptation, reverse inflow, and treasurization of “Hejijufang” prescriptions represent a large-scale practice of the “comigration of knowledge and material”, showing how knowledge that acquired locality in a new space (Joseon) flows back to its original space (China) in the form of material (patented medicine). This vividly proves that medical exchange between Korea and China was not a one-way dissemination from China to Joseon, but a process of creative transformation and mutual circulation.

This article examines Thomas Morgan’s medical ideas in the context of Newtonian iatromechanism in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Britain. In existing historiography, Morgan has been studied as a deist, but his medical writings have received little attention. In fact, Morgan has been classified as a Newtonian iatromechanist, but viewed as a minor figure in comparison with other Newtonians such as Archibald Pitcairne, George Cheyne, and James Keill. Such an assessment is partly due to the fact that Morgan did not have a social connection with Isaac Newton while others did, but also because Morgan’s medical writing has been considered second-class and largely repeating earlier Newtonian works. However, close examination shows that though Morgan shared some common grounds with his predecessors, he developed original interpretations in many areas. Just like Pitcairne and his followers, Morgan looked upon an animal body as a complicated living machine whose life lay in the proper circulation of blood and other fluids through the small pipes distributed throughout the body. However, Morgan differed in that he, more than others, saw heat as an important factor in physiology. He thought that fire was condensed light and that the subtle substance of elementary fire was diffused through the universe. Heated air, or the air containing elementary fire breathed in acted as an expansive force to counterbalance the attractive forces between small particles in the animal body. According to Morgan, fever, which was considered a distinct disease at the time, was caused when the heated air in the blood was not properly evacuated or when the warmed body fluids were not cooled down. Morgan also argued that the main agent of digestion was the heat operating in the stomach. His heat-based interpretation was novel but fitted into the existing understanding of physical matters including the animal body, and it provided explanation about some physiological phenomena which were not fully explained before. The explanatory power of Morgan’s medical writing earned him a good reputation as a physician among his contemporaries. In the context of the transition from iatromechanism to vitalism, part of Morgan’s heat-based physiology may be considered as contributing to the shift, by proposing that the capacity to maintain body heat - that is, the ability to absorb, retain, and emit elementary fire and air - belonged solely to the living body.

This study examines the reception and eventual decline of psychoanalysis, which remained outside the psychiatric mainstream in prewar Japan, in the Department of Neuropsychiatry at Keijo Imperial University. It traces the scholarly formation of Kubo Kiyoji, who led the department, and the development of psychoanalytic research within the department. It focuses on the personal and intellectual networks of Japanese psychiatry and on Keijo Imperial University’s position within the academic hierarchy. Kubo encountered psychoanalysis through Eugen Bleuler, director of the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, while studying in Zurich. This exposure provided him with an intellectual framework distinct from the German psychiatry tradition that was dominant in Japanese psychiatry. Consequently, the research output of the Department of Neuropsychiatry at Keijo Imperial University reflected Kubo’s interests. The department produced articles introducing psychoanalytic theory and clinical case reports through the early 1930s. At the same time, Kubo adopted psychoanalytic theory eclectically rather than embracing it in its entirety, similar to Bleuler, who had maintained a cautious distance from Freud since the mid-1910s. Furthermore, Japanese psychiatry was shaped by a hierarchical structure centered on Kure Shuzo, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, within which psychoanalysis remained non-mainstream. Under these conditions, psychoanalytic research at Keijo Imperial University did not become a sustained departmental program and did not develop into sustained collaboration with Tohoku Imperial University, where psychoanalysis was actively pursued. Instead, the department’s research gradually shifted toward somatic therapies and other fields with more visible findings, a shift better suited to the department’s academic position. Consequently, the discontinuation of psychoanalytic research at Keijo Imperial University was not simply the result of a change in Kubo’s personal interests. Rather, it reflected the structural conditions under which Keijo, as a peripheral imperial university, had to concentrate its resources on research fields more favorable to securing academic prestige. By tracing this case, this study suggests that research in the medical faculty of Keijo Imperial University was affected not only by the personal and intellectual networks of medicine in the Japanese Empire, but also by Keijo’s position as a peripheral imperial university.

This paper examines the history of mask-wearing regulations in barbershops in colonial Korea, specifically in Keijō (modern-day Seoul) during the 1910s and 1920s. It focuses on the introduction and implementation of these regulations, as well as their political involvement with colonial hygiene governance and ethnic politics in the barbering industry. In 1911, the Government-General of Korea introduced a mask-wearing mandate for barbers as part of the Barbering Business Regulation Rule, making it one of the earliest mask mandates in the Japanese Empire. Initially, the colonial police enforced this rule to discipline colonial subjects under the guise of hygiene. However, starting in the mid-1910s, both Korean and Japanese barbering professionals began to utilize this regulation to compete against the rising number of Chinese migrant barbers. This paper illustrates how hygiene-related regulations, including the mask mandate in barbershops, interacted with ethnic rivalries within the colonial Korean barbering industry. Stereotypes portraying Chinese barbers as unhygienic and their shops as unsanitary were produced and fueled as Korean and Japanese barbers sought to eliminate their Chinese competitors, often with support from the colonial police. Ultimately, this case study will shed new light on the history of hygienic masks, which has so far mostly focused on medical settings, and will suggest future research avenues, particularly regarding its intersection with the social history of medicine.

The advent of experimental medicine in the early nineteenth century marked a crucial turning point in history of medicine. Historians unanimously recognize François Magendie (1783-1855), a physician and physiologist, as a pioneer of experimental medicine. Despite his significance, research on Magendie’s achievements and contributions remains limited. This scarcity stems from conflicting evaluations of Magendie's experimental medicine. On one hand, some claim that Magendie avoided hypotheses and simply accumulated individual facts. On the other hand, others argue that he implicitly used hypotheses. These differing views traces back to his disciple Claude Bernard (1813-1878), who believed it was impossible to conduct experiments without hypotheses. If Magendie was a pioneer of experimental medicine, then he must have had hypotheses as well. However, interpretations of his viewpoint on hypotheses vary. This paper aims to clarify this issue. By examining contemporary evaluations of physiology during Magendie’s time, the concept of collaborative research with chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794), and the laboratory environments where these ideas were realized, this study finds new insights into Magendie’s approaches to experimental medicine. Magendie was extremely cautious in formulating his own hypotheses, but he often designed experiments based on the hypotheses of other physiologists. His criticism of Bichat exemplifies this tendency. The conclusions derived from this study are as follows: first, there is a need to reconsider the current historical understanding of Magendie's experimental medicine; second, the history of early nineteenth century medicine, particularly in the context of large-scale collaborative research, requires a different analytical approach than that applied to earlier periods.