Korea Reimagined: An Exploration of Science, Technology, and Medicine

What do science, technology, and medicine mean from Korea? In this inaugural volume of WashU Ventures in Korean Studies, the authors set out to answer the question which has underpinned the rise of new interests within Korean studies: science studies, history of technology, and medical humanities. The essays here range across a wide array of topics, from sedge craft and traditional medicine to mental health, electricity, and kimchi refrigerators. Yet they cohere around investigating the relationship between Korean society and the central human activities of knowing nature, making things, and healing bodies. To better understand contemporary Korea as well as its process of modernization, this volume presents three themes: innovation as method and history, healing and medical identity, and the dialectics of global and local technologies.