Seoul Journal of Korean Studies | 2019
Imperatives of Care: Women and Medicine in Colonial Korea by Sonja Kim (review)
Abstract
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