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The goals of this article are to survey American scholarship of medicine in Korea during the modern period and to suggest perspectives such studies offer to the fields of Korean history, Asian studies, and 갾mainstream갿 history of medicine. Until recently, the history of medicine in modern Korea has been peripheralized in the larger fields within which it is subsumed for various reasons. Earlier researchers tended to operate from 갾Orientalist갿 frameworks or were informed by 갾modernization theory,갿 and thus have focused generally on American interventions in Korean public health and medicine (through missionaries, the US military, and other aid organizations) or that which has been conventionally perceived as 갾traditional갿 medicine. Critical scholarship in fields of STS and post-colonial studies, however, have recently inspired new research that reassess polemic issues such as technology transfer, translation of knowledge, cultural encounters, governmentality, processes involved in the revitalization of Han.i, construction of gender, and nexus among medicine, science, and technology. As such the field as expanded beyond Korean history to include anthropology, sociology, STS, and linguistics. Moreover, given the transnational nature of academia and possibilities for productive comparative research, Korean history of medicine may soon no longer remain in the margins
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