The Institutionalization of Public Hygiene in Korea, 1876-1910

Abstract

On the whole, the major impetus for the institutionalization of public hygiene in Korea came from two directions. On one hand, the self-enlightened intellectuals had introduced a variety of Western ideas and theories on public hygiene since the mid-eighteenth century. On the other hand, Japan strongly influenced the modern systems of Korean health care and medical education, especially through Japanese efforts at the sanitary control of infectious diseases such as smallpox and cholera. The institutionalization of Korea’s public hygiene in this period corresponded not to the high ideas of the progressive intellectuals but to the larger social and institutional changes caused by the major political events. Ideas of public hygiene were institutionalized as a powerful strategy of linking the imperial capital and colonial domains.