Soyoung Suh takes issue with my account of the diverse forces challenging the Korean medical landscape throughout much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In a work devoted explicitly to examining the factors contributing to the rise of biomedicine in post-1945 South Korea, it should not be surprising that the majority of the evidence presented takes up the emerging medical community as characterized primarily in terms of Western-trained doctors, nurses, and related categories of care- givers, as well as the newer forms of intervention these individuals provided, and the corresponding technologies they mobilized, including the new spaces in which they worked. Tracking the categories used by my historical actors, I have sought to document the changing forms of material practice and medical pedagogy that a new practitioner might have experienced.
Although I have indicated the reasons why I chose this subject through my title and introduction (DiMoia 2013: 16), I shall take the opportunity here to return to the questions raised, especially the call for a revised definition of medicine, one encompassing a range of actors, practices, and materials and drawing from (potentially) more than the biomedical.
