Dissertation Research: EunJeong Ma: The Herbal Medicine Cabinet -- Controversies Between Western-trained Pharmacists and Oriental Medicine Practitioners in South Korea

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This Science and Technology Studies Dissertation Improvement Grant requests expenses by a Ph.D. thesis level student at Cornell University to conduct interviews and participant observations in Korea. The dissertation is a study of a controversy between practitioners of Western and traditional medicine in Korea over the right to prescribe herbal remedies. Ever since the late 19th century, when Western medicine (WM) was introduced in Korea, Oriental Medicine (OM) practitioners and Western pharmacists have struggled over the right to prescribe herbal medicines. The conflict between the two parties escalated in 1993, when a legal clause in the Pharmaceutical Law governing the traditional type of herbal medicine cabinet at Western pharmacies was repealed. The herbal medicine cabinet contains a drug inventory that is used to organize, categorize, and store herbal ingredients for OM, and its design and organization also symbolize elements of OM tradition. The proposed research will trace the development and evolution of the controversy, and will focus on the herbal medicine cabinet, which was a contested boundary object located between the two professions. OM proponents contend that traditional knowledge is built into the herbal medicine cabinet, and that the placement of the medicine cabinet in a Western pharmacy is incommensurable with such knowledge. In contrast, WM proponents emphasize commensurability, and view modern medical science as a basis for validating and appropriating selected OM practices. Given this situation, the proposed field research will focus on the diverse uses and meanings of the herbal medicine cabinet when used in pharmacies, at hospitals and in the context of traditional herbal medicine. The field research also will compare how OM and WM practitioners diagnose and treat diseases, interact with patients, account for success. and failure. And conceive of the body. Using key concepts such as incommensurability from the Science & Technology Studies field, the dissertation treats the cabinet as a material and symbolic object that occupies an epistemic and cultural interface between the main parties in the dispute. The disputes between the parties raised many interesting questions about medical policies, public health issues, and professional jurisdiction rights, some of which were unique to Korea. The method of study combines ethnographic research at a hospital that practices both Western and Oriental Medicine, along with documentary analysis of popular and archival sources. The Korean case will elucidate how parties to the conflict differ in their positions about whether, for example, the medicine cabinet provides a point of common culture, or a boundary between incommensurable knowledges. Two broad sources of intellectual merit are, first, the substantive value of an interesting, and to some extent unique, case history of a controversy involving two medical traditions, and, second, a the conceptual value of a case-specific specification of core S&TS themes: incommensurability, boundary-object, trading zone, and boundary-work. The broader impact of the study will be in the area of public health policies. Traditional and Western medical systems co-exist (and occasionally) conflict in many national cultures today, including the US. The study will furnish detailed insight into the impact of Korean policies aiming to promote both traditional healing systems and Western medicine, and such insight may prove useful for studies of similar relationships in other regions.