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KMID : 0857920210240020037
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Yonsei Journal of Medical History
2021 Volume.24 No. 2 p.37 ~ p.60
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The Structure and Characteristics of Neurosis Discourse in East Asia : The Cross Between Imperial Medicine and Colonial Medicine
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Sihn Kyu-Hwan
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Abstract
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Since the mid-19th century, neurosis has been regarded as a colonial disease unrelated to the inferior colonists as a product of civilization, urbanization, and modernization. In the process of imperialist expansion, tropical medicine was part of the colonialism, and tropical medicine became an essential knowledge for colonization. In particular, in colonial Taiwan, the Japanese accepted tropical neurasthenia as a sign of ethnic degradation, and climate determinism worked as an efficient theory to hierarchize empires and colonies. Even a neurasthenia became a criterion for hierarchizing into native Japanese, colonial Japanese, and the colonized. On the other hand, in Korea, a climate zone similar to that of Japan, although climate determinism did not have much effect, Japanese doctors judged that the hierarchy of the colonizer and the colonized could be determined by neurosis in colonial Korea.
The question of how to resolve the prevalence of tropical neurasthenia caused by tropical climates in colonial Taiwan and how to secure the legitimacy of colonization was a task left to Japanese medical professionals in Taiwan. Shuzo Naka(1900-1988), a representative psychiatrist in Taiwan’s colonial medicine in the 1930s and 1940s, paid attention to Shoma Morita(1874-1938)’s theory of shinkeishitsu (a nervous-prone personality with a hypochondriacal base) as a way to solve the problem of tropical acclimation and maintain the national spirit. Morita’s theory of shinkeishitsu further strengthened the hierarchy of Japanese colonizer and the colonized as a way to restore the collective spirit and identity of the Japanese.
As such, from the end of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century, the discourse of neurosis in East Asia was a combination of various narratives to secure the legitimacy of colonial rule from the perspective of imperialist racism and civilization. In particular, Japan sought to expand the basis of colonial medicine by attracting various neurosis discourses such as neurological theory and psychoanalysis to overcome the crisis theory of ethnic degradation that emerged in colonies.
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KEYWORD
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East Asia, neurosis, imperial medicine, colonial medicine, tropical medicine, neurasthenia, climate determinism, ethnic degeneration
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