YI Suki’s Yoksimanpil and the Professional Identity of a Chung'in Medical Official in Eighteenth Century Choson Korea

Abstract

About one hundred years after the publication of Tongŭibogam (1613), a physician at the court YI Suki (1664-?) wrote a medical manuscript titled Yŏksimanpil (Miscellaneous Jottings on Medical Experiences and Tests, 1734). As indicated in its title, Yŏksimanpil was a medical essay composed of 130 medical case histories, drawing on what YI Suki himself had experienced in his medical practices. This paper examines the messages YI Suki in Yŏksimanpil tried to address to his fellow Korean doctors, and by doing so illuminates an aspect of the medicine in the late Chosŏn period. The argument goes that YI Suki wrote Yŏksimanpil as a vehicle for promulgating his professional identity as a bureaucratic physician who belonged to the network of the chung'in technical officials-a group of government technical functionaries in late Chosŏn Korea. Throughout the late Chosŏn period, the chung'in technical officials had been discriminated, institutionally and socioculturally, against the yangban literati, while their promotion to honored higher positions was blocked. It was in the late 17th and early 18th century that a group of chung'in officials tried to secure their sociocultural places for their professional activity, thus bringing to light their social and professional identity in Chosŏn society. A member of the network of the chung'in technical officials in the early 18th century, YI Suki was in an effort to position himself as a doctor somewhere between the medical tradition and the Confucian literary tradition. In these sociocultural contexts, we can see more clearly what YI Suki tried to speak of in his book and the historical meaning of the medical writing Yŏksimanpil. First, the way he practiced medicine was testing and confirming what the received medical textbooks had asserted (Chŭnghŏmkobang). This style of practicing medicine could be viewed as a reflection of the comprehensivity trait of bureaucratic court physicians network YI Suki belonged to. Also this type of practice has the implication that YI Suki himself was a well-versed practitioner following the medical textual tradition, which was closely associated with the medical officials network. The emergence of the practice Chŭnghŏmkobang could be better understood in the backdrop of over 100 years of maturation process of Tongŭibogam in the clinical practices. Second, he formulated the professional identity of physicians only in terms of medical proficiency without recourse to the Confucian literary tradition. In other words, in promoting the social status of medicine, he did not resort to Confucian morality. He instead emphasized his dexterity or resourcefulness in dealing with millions of ever-changing diseases (Imsikwŏnbyŏn ). Conceivably, this way of characterizing his own medical practice-by way of strongly combining the textual tradition and the experiential tradition while keeping distance with the Confucian literary tradition-reflected the complexity of the ambivalent identity of the technical chung'in officials, especially in regard to Confucianism, between Confucian physicians and hereditary doctors. All in all, YI Suki presented himself as an ideal image of the physician, which arguably reflected the sociocultural and academic context of the network of the chung'in technical officials in early 18th century Chosŏn Korea.