Naming the Local

My greatest thanks go to my family.My mother, Seungnam Paik, and my father, Daeyong Suh, have always supported me, never doubting the value of my intellectual pursuits.Th eir faith in God in all circumstances of life has had an enduring impact on me.My three younger sisters, Eunyoung, Nayoung, and Donghee, always cheer me up with their unique sense of humor and passionate commitment to career and family.I cannot think of myself as a researcher and teacher without the inspiration I have gotten from my sisters.I am greatly indebted to my parents-in-law, Jungho Nam and Yunjin Lee.Th eir love and prayer has always encouraged me to explore the world in my own way.My husband, Sangwook Sunny Nam, has sacrifi ced a lot to walk with me, and provided exceptional support without which I could not have survived.My children, Sean and Yirang, have given me im mense love, joy, and solace.Without them, my journey in writing this book could have been gray and dull.Many friends I have met in small, local Korean churches in the United States have helped me keep moving forward when words fail and a sense of futility prevails. I use McCune-Reischauer romanization for terms and names in Korean.Chinese and Japa nese are rendered in Pinyin and Hepburn, respectively.East Asian names are given last name fi rst, without a comma.Authors of works in En glish are the exception.I used digitalized court rec ords of Chosn Korea.For the year, I relied on the online archive's translation.Th e lunar month and date in numbers follow the year according to the traditional order.For instance, "Sngjong sillok, 1478.10. 29" implies the source was recorded in the ninth year of King Sngjong's reign, in the tenth lunar month, on the twentyninth day.Th e digital source also displays the corresponding reign period of the Chinese emperor.All En glish translations are my own unless other wise indicated.I translated the titles of Korean books and articles if no En glish translation was provided by the authors.If the authors provided their own translation and transliteration, I respected them.A certain degree of inconsistency was unavoidable.For instance, I rendered fi re illness as hwabyng, yet it was oft en written as hwa-byung, hwabyung, or hwatpyng by other authors.Last, in the List of Characters, some Chinese characters may appear twice, as I recognize both Korean and Chinese transliterations.For instance, I wrote both men and mun for as the character appears in both Chinese and Korean texts. Note on ConventionsH Chun (1539-1615) lived an exceptional life as a physician in sixteenth- century Chosn Korea.Born the illegitimate son of an aristocratic offi cial (yangban), H Chun was educated in the Confucian classics and became a man of erudition.He began his medical career at the Palace Clinic (Naeiwn) around 1570 thanks to a fellow high offi cer's recommendation.He gained the trust of King Snjo (r.1567-1608) by successfully treating the crown prince's smallpox in 1590, and the king further supported H Chun aft er he accompanied the king on the royal exodus from the palace to iju during the war with Japan (1592-98).Aft er the war, H Chun took full responsibility for compiling a medical anthology following King Snjo's wish to reform "the crude overuse and rough repetition" of medical texts circulated in China and Korea. 1 Although H Chun was briefl y exiled aft er the king's death in 1608, the banishment gave him the necessary isolation to complete the proj ect.H Chun submitted his compilation to the new king, Kwanghae (r.1608-23), in 1610; the court published it in 1613.Given these scholarly and clinical achievements, the highest offi cial rank, "se nior fi rst," was conferred on H Chun as a posthumous honor. 2 In Korean history, there are many physicians known for their excellent medical skills or for being a king's favorite.But it was rather uncommon to combine exceptional scholarly talent, medical skill, and royal support at the same time.H Chun's exceptionalism is further exemplifi ed by his choice of the word tongi, or "Eastern medicine," which represented a geo graph i cal distinction of a medical tradition.By highlighting Eastern medicine in the title of his masterpiece, Tongi pogam (Precious mirror of Eastern More signifi cantly, H Chun wrote a few medical texts in vernacular Korean, aiming to reach wider audiences.With the dynasty's support, texts about pregnancy and childbirth, emergency aids, curing smallpox, and special prescriptions of medicines called nabyak were composed in Korean.H Chun's compilation represented the culmination of medical lit er a ture in Korean since the invention of the Korean alphabet (Han'gl) in 1446.Th e dynasty aimed to broaden medical governance through the textual production of medicine.In addition, H Chun's skillful synthesis, covering the full repertoire of Chinese originals available by the sixteenth century, demonstrated his competence in mastering the textual production of medicine from China.Deft selections, not a mere cutting and pasting of the originals, fl eshed out the structure of his anthology of medicine.In terms of motivation, language, content, and interpretative framework, H Chun's work indeed seems to be a culmination of the indigenization of medicine in early seventeenth-century Korea.No won der that his Precious Mirror of Eastern Medicine has received more scholarly and popu lar attention than has any other premodern medical text in Korea.A variety of legends and folktales about H Chun provided an imaginative resource for a con temporary novel, which has struck a chord since its publication in 1990. 5 A tele vi sion soap opera, which aired between November 1999 and June 2000, dramatized H Chun's life and achievements, earning high ratings.Paralleling his popularity has been the conventional strategy of conjuring up Eastern medicine, which per sis tently stimulates cultural pride and commercial profi t.In a time of international competition and professional contestation, H Chun and his identifi cation with Eastern medicine serve well to delineate Korean people's view of traditional medicine as uniquely Korean and traditional.As an icon of indigenization, however, H Chun si mul ta neously discloses layers of exogenous factors, through which the local attributes of medicine were established, modifi ed, or even degraded.Primarily, it should be remembered that his Precious Mirror of Eastern Medicine was written in refi ned classical Chinese, which was the hegemonic language among the Korean literati until the turn of the twentieth century.Th e elegant writing style helped his work gain ac cep tance in eighteenth-century literary circles in East Asia; Japa nese editions of the Precious Mirror of Eastern Medicine appeared in 1724 and then again in 1799, and seventeen Chinese editions were printed starting in 1763. 6 Conversely, his vernacular publications mostly remained less popu lar than the Precious Mirror of Eastern Medicine in his own time and even today.Although H Chun's recognition of the local attributes successfully complemented his encyclopedic composition, the elite registration of the native attributes did not necessarily pave the way for vernacular initiatives in medicine.Th e clinical signifi cance of the Precious Mirror of Eastern Medicine was not immediate.Th ose who sought the simplest, easiest, and most eff ective way of curing the sick viewed the Precious Mirror of Eastern Medicine as including unnecessary philosophical discussions and crude illustrations.King Chngjo (r.1776-1800), for instance, ordered H Chun's compilation to be abridged, criticizing that "the theory [of the text] and rationale in prescription is too complicated, hence, the structure and examples are not concisely arranged." 7It is not surprising that in late nineteenth-century Korea, one of the most popu lar and beloved medical texts was Hwang To-yn's (1807-84) Pangyak happ'yn (Compendium of prescriptions, 1885), which had a simple layout and presented concise formulas with the latest Chinese information about materia medica. 8 H Chun's nuanced framework of Eastern medicine did not always gain support.It was not until the late nineteenth century that Eastern medicine reappeared in a medical text's title to refl ect the geo graph i cal distinction with a sense of medical lineage.Although the con temporary In disease of the greater yang, the pulse is fl oating, the head and nape are stiff and painful, and [ there is] aversion to cold.When in greater yang disease [ there is] heat eff usion, sweating, aversion to wind, and a pulse that is moderate, it is called wind strike.Greater yang disease, whether heat has eff used or not, as long as there is aversion to cold, with generalized pain, retching counter fl ow, and yin and yang [pulses] both tight, is called cold damage. 19

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