Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, and Nation-Building in South Korea Since 1945

Abstract

This book surveys the transformation of medical practice in Korea from the late 19th century to the present, detailing the numerous changes involved as late Choson Korea (1876-1910) gave way to Japanese colonization (1910-1945), the post-war American Occupation (1945-1948), and an independent Republic of Korea (ROK) (1948- ), with the Korean War soon to come. Moreover, the book focuses on the corresponding history of medical intervention—sanitary, surgical, and preventive public health—by a wide array of private, university-based, and state-led actors, emphasizing that the so-called “Miracle of the Han,” the mythic rise of the South Korean economy from the mid-1960s, was accompanied by a parallel effort to measure, understand, and ultimately reshape the bodies of Koreans to create a new type of citizen, thereby binding that individual to the state though biomedical practice. These forms of intervention would include large-scale public health efforts directed at specific diseases—tuberculosis, leprosy, intestinal parasites—along with related state-directed campaigns of the 1960s, especially Family Planning. Ultimately, the book argues that the newly redefined relationship between the individual, the body, and the state, along with marketplace forces and an emerging national health insurance scheme, offers a great deal toward explaining the flexibility with which South Koreans now treat their own bodies, increasingly engaging in a variety of surgical enhancements since the late 1990s in a market framed by the neoliberal rhetoric of choice.