Managing “dis-ease”: Print media, medical images, and patent medicine advertisements in colonial Korea

Abstract

Over the past several decades, cultural studies scholars have shown a keen interest in the symbiosis between mass media and medicine, paying substantial attention to the capacity of media to construct meanings and images of health and disease and their material effects. In this article, I attempt to extend the insights of this scholarship into the historical context of colonial Korea under the non-western imperial power of Japan in the early 20th century. I critically analyze medical images and health discourses in print media to interrogate the ways in which these images and texts were interwoven in the production of novel ideas, metaphors, and notions of health, illness, and the body in the colonial modernity of Korea under Japanese rule (1910–45). Medical illustrations, along with texts in the vernacular newspapers and their patent medicine advertisements, powerfully forged visions of “ideal” male and female bodies at the intersection of Japanese colonialism, Korean nationalism, and modernity.

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“…Secondly, the male body became an icon of the healthy body, while the female body was consistently portrayed as unruly, the icon of illness, and the object of remedy and reform. 10 Finally, though traditional eastern medicine ( ) continued to be practised and adapted, Western biomedicine and its various cures were essential in the colonial state's construction, maintenance, and enforcement of bodily norms and ideals centring around reproductive heterosexuality. 11 As the scholar of gender and sexuality Ed Cohen has argued, biomedicine constructs defensible interior which needs to protect itself ceaselessly from a hostile exterior'.…”