Start Date
12-6-2011 9:30 AM
End Date
12-6-2011 12:00 PM
Subject Areas
Asia, colonial/imperial, gender, motherhood, reproduction
Abstract
In a 1909 report on women’s medical work in Korea, American Methodist missionary Dr. Rosetta Sherwood Hall commented that one of the largest complaints among her patients was “Women’s Disease,” which was not only time-consuming and difficult to treat, but distinct, demanding new forms of medical interventions and highlighting the link with Korean notions of infertility. What emerged in the Korean print media in the 1920s and 1930s was a body of health-related articles about “Women’s Disease” and advertisements for patent medicines that aimed to treat it. This paper examines these discussions to better understand: (1) the concerns in Korean society regarding the health of women, and (2) how female infertility was managed. Comparing these discussions against earlier traditions as well as turn of 20th century American tocology, this paper argues that family customs and Korean healing practices within the colonial context produced a gynecological tradition skewed towards the protection of women’s fertility, that not only incorporated new surgical techniques and bio-medical understandings of women’s reproductive cycles, but also perpetuated pre-existing practices in managing infertility. In fact, infertility or what is perceived as infertility continues to be a major medical concern for women in contemporary Korean society, and their approaches to manage it, including the use of medications, emerges from this longer history.
Keywords
Korea, infertility, gynecology, women’s disease, missionary, patent medicine
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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Managing Infertility and 'Women's Disease' in Colonial Korea
In a 1909 report on women’s medical work in Korea, American Methodist missionary Dr. Rosetta Sherwood Hall commented that one of the largest complaints among her patients was “Women’s Disease,” which was not only time-consuming and difficult to treat, but distinct, demanding new forms of medical interventions and highlighting the link with Korean notions of infertility. What emerged in the Korean print media in the 1920s and 1930s was a body of health-related articles about “Women’s Disease” and advertisements for patent medicines that aimed to treat it. This paper examines these discussions to better understand: (1) the concerns in Korean society regarding the health of women, and (2) how female infertility was managed. Comparing these discussions against earlier traditions as well as turn of 20th century American tocology, this paper argues that family customs and Korean healing practices within the colonial context produced a gynecological tradition skewed towards the protection of women’s fertility, that not only incorporated new surgical techniques and bio-medical understandings of women’s reproductive cycles, but also perpetuated pre-existing practices in managing infertility. In fact, infertility or what is perceived as infertility continues to be a major medical concern for women in contemporary Korean society, and their approaches to manage it, including the use of medications, emerges from this longer history.