결핵의 재구성: 질병분류의 정치와 식민지 조선 한의학의 정체성

Abstract

This article examines the identity of Korean traditional medicine under the influence of western medicine in Colonial Korea by investigating conceptual reconstruction of tuberculosis. Western medicine and Korean traditional medicine, which faced each other in the time and space of modern Korea, constructed new identities through each other. This process was initially directed against Korean traditional medicine. It was because the Japanese Government-General of Korea imposed the learning of western medicine upon traditional practitioners. Korean traditional medicine, devoted to study western medicine while preserving its own theory and practice in the 1910s and 1920s, later established a new identity through the debate on the revival of Korean traditional medicine in 1934. The existing studies have explained that after the debate, Korean traditional medicine regained self-confidence and returned to its original appearances or placed itself at a level equal to or surpassing western medicine. They successfully explain the changing status of Korean traditional medicine. Meanwhile, they also show the limitation of assuming it as a fixed subject. In their descriptions, Korean traditional medicine only adjusted its attitude toward western medicine while keeping its knowledge system intact. However, the re-drawn Korean traditional medicine was a new kind of thing, far from the traditional or western medicine. In the 1930s, Korean traditional medicine produced hybrid theory, a compound of the traditional and the western. In this paper, it is claimed that the internalization of western medicine, which is symbolized by germ theory, had a great influence on the identity of Korean traditional medicine. The disease classification of western medicine, which Korean traditional medicine learned and practiced for the preparation of the examination or the sale of western drugs, changed the epistemological frame, and the change in the frame of perception was reflected in the identity of Korean traditional medicine. That explains why newly constructed Korean traditional medicine used the language of germ theory. For traditional practitioners, western medicine was ‘what I have to know’ and ‘what I want to learn,’ but it was also ‘what I got used to involuntarily’ as the system of knowledge was reconstructed.