Naming the Local is a long-awaited contribution to an underrepresented area in the medical history of East Asia. As the first English monograph on Korean medical history, it responds to unsatisfied interest among non-Korean speaking audiences. Its coverage of a six-hundred-year history from the fifteenth century Choson dynasty to contemporary South Korea makes this book highly informative. Its diverse themes lead readers to the flamboyant scenery of the history of medicine in Korea, including the localization of botanical knowledge, the publication and circulation of medical texts with the self-conscious term Tongui 東醫 (Eastern Medicine), debates between pro- and anti- traditional medicine camps during the colonial period, biometric investigations for identifying Koreanness, nationalism-tinged advertisements of ready-made medicines in the 1920s and 1930s, and the formalization and globalization of hwabyong – known as “culture-bound syndrome” – in post-colonial South Korea. Each chapter, even each section, captures spectacular moments in the medical history of this under-examined area.

Chapter 1 presents the issue of Hyangyak 鄕藥, or local botanicals, in the Choson dynasty (1392–1910). Since the Koryo dynasty (918–1392), the establishment of a knowledge system of locally available herbs was a central issue in the indigenization of medical knowledge which mainly dealt with medicinal herbs available on Chinese soil. The Choson dynasty's efforts to localize herbal knowledge culminated in the publication of the Hyangyak chipsongbang 鄕藥集成方 (1433), a focus of Chapter 1.Footnote ¹ Contrary to previous studies emphasizing the independence of medical knowledge by the Hyangyak movement, the author argues that its achievement is ambivalent since Choson scholars held no autonomy in the development of local knowledge. She insists that “[The claim of local botanicals] does not imply any rigid division between the Chinese and the local or the universal and the particular; rather, it alludes to a discerning way of relating the local to the more authoritative system of knowledge” (p. 38).

Chapter 2 investigates another naming term, Tongui 東醫 (Eastern Medicine), a self-conscious designation for the Korean medical tradition. This chapter ambitiously examines medical history on the Korean peninsula in terms of Tongui from the publication of the Tongui pogam 東醫寶鑑 (Precious Mirror of Eastern Medicine) in 1613 to the colonial period (1910–1945) by tracing Korean scholars’ ways of accepting, interpreting, and representing Shanghanlun 傷寒論 (Treatises on Cold Damage Disorders). Following the Treatises’ position under the name Tongui, readers can appreciate the organizing principles of Tongui pogam – a reorganized compilation of East Asian medical theories and practices up to the sixteenth century – the philosophy of Sasang medicine, a synthesis of Confucianism and East Asian medicine, proposed by the Tongui suse powon 東醫壽世保元 (Longevity and Life Preservation in Eastern Medicine, 1894), and the predicaments of early twentieth-century practitioners of traditional medicine, who faced multilayered oppression in the grip of colonialism and biomedicine.

Chapter 3 summons three groups of medical professionals in the colonial period (1910–1945) who were involved with “authenticating indigenous attributes” (p. 73): 1) advocates of traditional medicine who debated the validity of Korean medicine; 2) Japanese researchers who looked for Koreanness in terms of biomedical research, in particular, of biometric characteristics; and 3) Korean biomedicine practitioners who, borrowing methods from Japanese scholars, attempted to identify being Korean, compared to being Japanese or European. Drawing on multiple voices among various actors, this chapter demonstrates that “the idea of the Choson's specificity in relation to health and disease was not an intrinsic trait that would be discovered, but was an outcome of contesting discourses and compromising research methods” (p. 103).

Chapter 4 adds an interesting angle in the naming of the local, the medical advertisements of ready-made drugs circulating in colonial Korea. Presenting newspaper advertisements for four types of ready-made traditional medicine – water (su 水), elixir (tan 丹), pills (hwan 丸), and paste (ko 膏) – and biomedical molecules, all of which were provided by Korean manufacturers, this chapter examines how medical advertisements appealed to the seemingly incompatible sensibilities of both being traditional Korean, connected to a familiar past, and being modern Korean, desiring an enlightened and efficient future. This coexistence of ambivalent messages itself speaks to the contested identities among Koreans at the time. Indeed, advertisements for blockbuster medicines on the Korean peninsula in the early twentieth century illuminate interesting intersections at the time; in constructing an imagined community through consuming ready-made medicines, which are attached to plural imaginations of Koreanness, they were situated in print capitalism, pharmaceutical capitalism, and Japanese colonialism.

Chapter 5 examines a Korean-specific psychiatric illness, hwabyong, and its circulation both on the local and global stage. The similarities and differences between two main actors in this chapter, one from the biomedical sector and the other from the Korean medical sector, make the formalization of this intriguing illness more interesting. Similarly, both researchers had initially emphasized the locality of the illness – by issuing it as culture-bound syndrome and by defining it with the East Asian medical notion of constraint or ul 鬱 – and, later, have focussed on the universality of the illness in seeking to define its position in biomedical nosology. However, they have variously designated it as an anger disorder (biomedical doctors) and depression (Korean medical doctors). This chapter articulates that even a locally-specific disease needs an internationally acceptable nomenclature in this globalized and biomedically hegemonized contemporary world, and explains how local actors respond to the power-laden globalized medical knowledge.

Even though the mosaic pieces of each chapter in Naming the Local illuminate fascinating issues in Korean medical history, it appears that the whole picture that the pieces attempt to delineate is blurred and not clearly worked out. Two issues can be raised regarding this lack of clarity. First, combining a six-hundred-year medical history in one volume inevitably faces points of rupture, from which subjectivities and contexts substantially diverge, and by which “the local” is rendered as highly polysemous phenomena. In particular, there is a point of upheaval between premodern and modern states. In this regard, between Chapters 1 and 2 (excluding the section on “Tongui” in the colonial period) and Chapters 3, 4, and 5, there are noticeably divergent ways of naming and constructing the local, as the premodern and modern states have palpable dissimilarities in the geographic imagination and consciousness of the self and others. The particular characteristics of modern nation-states widen the diverging angle. This dominant form of the state in contemporary society is characterized by scrupulous attention to medical institutions with detailed regulations of medical education and the licensing system. Korea experienced this institutional sea change in the context of colonization by neighboring Japan and a preference for biomedicine by the colonial government, thus adding to the complexity. Even though these historical ruptures are significant conditions in describing the six-hundred-year history, this book does not pay much attention to the flow of historical development, leaving the individual mosaic pieces of the chapters with no level of interactivity between them.

Second, the author has put together multiple modes of “naming the local” by diverse actors, who have various intentions, using plural languages. Premodern actors’ endeavor to indigenize medical knowledge, traditional medical practitioners’ arguments favoring East Asian medicine in the contexts of the biomedical hegemony in the colonial period, biomedical researchers’ identification of the anthropogenic features of the Korean population, medical manufacturers’ investment and advertisement for profit, and biomedical and traditional medical researchers’ actions and reactions to globalize a culture-specific illness in post-colonial Korea … all of this is combined into a single 167-page volume under the title of Naming the Local. Readers will enjoy the spectacle. However, they will feel that the distance between some naming modes, such as identifying scarlet fever in colonized Choson Korea by hygiene-minded biomedical researchers (Chapter 3) and new syntheses of East Asian medicine and philosophy by Sasang medicine (Chapter 2), is too far to be combined in one volume.

Despite its incomplete journey from the Choson Dynasty to post-colonial Korea, however, this first English monograph of Korean medical history does fulfil a role. Allowing international audiences to appreciate various and interesting issues in an underrepresented area in East Asian medical history, this monograph itself contributes to the work of Naming the Local, and adds one more item to a must-read list among researchers and students of East Asia studies, medical history, and Korean studies.