Re-spatializing Center and Periphery in East Asian Medicine

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

This panel focuses on the politics of medicine. The four papers look at herbal drugs, healing cultures, and medical practices originated from geopolitical peripheries and marginalized by modern biomedicine, yet highlight the ways in which these branches of peripheral medicine were re-centered in the medical-cum-political arena in China, Korea and more broadly, East Asia. Through examining the various political, commercial and medical networks in which peripheral medicine regained significance, the panel challenges both the dominance of modern biomedicine and the assumed centrality and homogeneity of Chinese Traditional Medicine. Yunju Chen investigates the circulation of drugs in the far southern region of Song-Yuan China, showing that both the state and literati were concerned with medicine specific to southern miasmatic disorders. Xiaoshun Zeng studies an herbal remedy from southwestern China that first emerged in the late Qing period and later became an “Ethnic Medicine” in the PRC, shedding light on a third component to the bifurcated field of Chinese versus Western medicine in modern China. Adding a comparative perspective form Korea, Eunjeong Ma discusses the recent history of South Korean government advocating mass production, global marketing and scientific research for traditional herbal medicine. Finally, James Flowers explores Sŏk Kok, a Korean physician-scholar at the turn of the twentieth century who argued for re-centering Korea in the geopolitical world of East Asia by returning to Han Dynasty medical and philosophical texts. Taken together, the four papers raise questions on conventional understandings of center and periphery in East Asia through the lenses of medicine.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Xiaoshun Zeng, University of Washington

Chair

• Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Academia Sinica

Individual Presentations

• Politics of Healing Cultures: Circulation of Drugs in the Far South of Song-Yuan China - Yun-ju Chen, Academia Sinica

• Private Cure, National Drug, Ethnic Medicine: The History of Yunnan White Medicine and the Negotiation of Medical Authenticity in Twentieth-Century China - Xiaoshun Zeng, University of Washington

• Foods or Drugs?: Korean Herbal Medicines in the Making - Eunjeong Ma, Pohang University of Science and Technology

• Stone Gorge Yi: Using Medicine to Reconfigure Korea’s Place in the World in the Early Twentieth Century - James Flowers, Johns Hopkins University

Discussant

• Hoi-eun Kim, Texas A&M University