동아시아 전통의학의 근대성 탐구

Abstract

How to define modernity is a key issue in many academic disciplines. Although ‘modern medicine’is a very often and widely used term, the exact meaning of the term has not been precisely defined. Anatomy tends to have been presented as a criterion of medical modernity on the ground that it represents the scientific positivity by its visibility. However, anatomical knowledge on human body has reached a quite high level in ancient Hellenistic period more than 2,000 years before thanks to the excellent works of renowned anatomists such as Herophilus and Erasistratus. As a result, it is difficult to present anatomy itself as a definite criterion of medical modernity. In this paper, the author regarded it the crucial moment when anatomy no longer remained as a separate discipline, but it was closely related to other fields of medicine such as physiology and pathology. Along with this, artificial intervention was presented as a criterion of medical modernity instead of Hippocratic naturalism which underlines the spontaneous healing power of nature. The above mentioned criteria have been applied to investigate the medical modernity in traditional medicine of East Asia. The writings of Sugita Genpaku, Wang Ching Ren, and Miura Baien have been analysed for this purpose.