This study of the growth of biomedical infrastructure and practice in South Korea breaks new ground as the first English-language book on the topic, deftly addressing the fields of both history of science and medicine and East Asian history. Works focusing on the period after 1945 are still relatively rare in the history of science and medicine in East Asia outside China. By locating the formation of South Korean biomedicine in this era, DiMoia emphasizes that a highly privatized system of biomedicine relying on enthusiastic consumers – of which Gangnam's plastic surgery clinics are an iconic part – became possible only very recently and by no means inevitably. Likening people's choice of biomedicine among multiple health care options to ‘ordinary shopping’ (p. 2), he argues that society's embrace of a highly interventionist medical culture was ambivalent and gradual. Moreover, the South Korean state's decision to prioritize biomedicine was as ideological as the possible alternatives, such as traditional medicine.

Six wide-ranging case studies guide us through this multifaceted transformation, peppered with a variety of intriguing characters and anecdotes. Chapter 1 surveys the fortunes of traditional medicine from the end of the Joseon Dynasty at the turn of the century and through Japanese colonial rule to the arrival of the US Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) in 1945, focusing on the story of one family of traditional medicine practitioners. Chapter 2 describes USAMGIK's public-health policy to the end of occupation in 1948, arguing that its choice to favour biomedicine was justified by the politics of the 1946 cholera crisis. Chapter 3 looks in depth at the development of open heart surgery at Seoul National University Hospital under a technical exchange partnership with the University of Minnesota during and after the Korean War. Moving into Park Chung Hee's presidency, Chapter 4 traces how the state built on USAMGIK's precedent of public-health intervention and statistical surveillance to promote novel and invasive means of family planning, such as the Lippes loop intrauterine device and vasectomy, especially in the countryside. Similarly, Chapter 5 follows the state's campaigns to eliminate parasites among schoolchildren and in the military, introducing far-reaching measures to gather biological (faecal) samples and distribute anthelmintic medicines. Finally, Chapter 6 examines the development of double-eyelid facial plastic surgery in the global context to the present day.

While placing South Korean biomedicine within a history of nation building in a postcolonial context, DiMoia skilfully resists the reproduction of a nationalist narrative. In particular, he modifies the overarching framework of Cold War technological transfer in an age of reconstruction and development with much insight. In the decades after 1945, South Korea relied significantly on external actors and international aid for material resources, funding and education in developing biomedicine. DiMoia carefully foregrounds the intentions of local scientific and professional practitioners amid the intersection of multiple and competing interests. His account also engages with the thorny issues of Japanese and US imperialism by listening for the gaps between the perceptions of actors on the one hand, and the implications and outcomes of the colonial, occupation and military regimes on the other, with great sensitivity to what was both said and unsaid. The book is rarely top-down and makes for especially enjoyable reading in the places where it highlights how ordinary people experienced, and at times resisted, the state's biomedical apparatus. The details of the everyday institutional texture of the medical infrastructure are evocative and frequently surprising.

If I have any criticism of the book, it would be that there are a number of errors in the copy-editing, and the attention to causal complexity sometimes comes at the expense of narrative streamlining. As a pioneering work, it invaluably opens up new paths in the history of contemporary science in East Asia. For example, the author himself invites further work on what he calls ‘traditional Korean medicine’ more generally in the period, military reproductive education and psychiatry, and autopsy. The rich chapters suggest strands that are worth exploring beyond the material already covered, including in areas such as international development, pharmaceuticals, and the social sciences and demographic planning. This important and fascinating book should make essential reading for anyone interested in the global history of contemporary science and medicine and post-1945 North East Asia.