“The Nearest Faraway Place”: South Korean Medical Out-reach and Southeast Asia as Its Research Context, 1954-1973

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article interrogates the role of Korean military and civilian medicine during the Vietnam War (1965-1973), investigating its links to the period of reconstruction (1954-1960) following the Korean War, along with implications for the domestic population in the late 1960s and following. As early as the mid-1950s, civil society organizations were making contributions to aid other Asian nations, creating an Asian-Asian style of partnership often missing from the literature. Even as postwar South Korea refurbished its public health system, transformed its medical pedagogy at hospitals, and perfected new types of medical specialization, there was an ambi-tion to engage with its neighbors through outreach. The Vietnam War provided a context in which this set of ambitions could be realized, providing a strong compo-nent of civilian medicine and aid to complement the military medical program de-signed primarily to handle wounded troops and casualties. This civil component hap-pened in part because of the civilian presence linked with construction and engineer-ing in Vietnam, and also was driven by a desire to reach out to the Vietnamese people as a partner nation. In this second case, Korean medical teams, over a period of nearly a decade (1964-1973), performed vaccinations, handled neonatal and senior care in health screenings, and sought to craft a positive impression. The enormous energy devoted to civilian medicine has left many questions, and at the very least, it is possible to link the Southeast Asian setting with the domestic in the form of po-licing for the spread of disease, especially malaria and parasites. In this sense, South-east Asia served as an experimental context for Korean medicine, a “faraway place” to work out issues of practice before returning home.

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