The Characteristics of Joseon Medicine: Discourses on the Body, Illustration and Dissection

Abstract

I want to review discourses on late–Joseon-period illustrations of the body in this article. In the fields of Joseon medicine and natural history, anatomical knowledge functioned as the determinant of whether a medical perspective was right or wrong. While accepting such theories of Chinese medicine, Dongeui bogam also incorporated Taoist perceptions of the body, along with its emphasis on cultivation of energy, spirit and body. On the other hand, discussions in the natural history field were more active. Natural historians often questioned what practitioners of medicine took as given such as the connections between the five organs and the five elements, and the relationship between the five internal organs and five sensory organs. However, they did not think of anatomical research as something positive. Western discourses on the body, illustration and dissection, which markedly differed from the traditional perspective, entered Joseon Korea beginning in the late seventeenth century. Western medicine was supported by even more anatomical study, which presented a serious challenge to existing perspectives of the body. That challenge was also a challenge to the Neo- Confucian perception of the body, the dominant framework of thought in Joseon Korea.