질병의 근대: 일제강점기 부인병의 의미와 매약광고

This study aims to explore the meanings of women’s disease in Korea under Japanese rule. Colonial modernity in Korea saw the rise and development of modern medicine. This process was closely linked with the cultural origin and dissemination of countless languages, meta phors, images, and stereotypes of illnesses through modern mass media. The study aims at capturing this socio-cultural phenomenon by naming it the “modernity of disease” and investigates it from a feminist perspective, focusing on the social, cultural, and medical meanings of what was then called puinbyǒng (婦人病; women’s disease). Puinbyǒng referred to a con stellation of women’s diseases concerning pregnancy and childbirth in cluding irregular menstruation, leucorrhea, infertility, venereal disease, and frigidity. It served as a powerful and convenient euphemism for women’s sexual and reproductive illnesses. For the purpose of the study, the cultural meanings of women’s diseases are delineated through a crit ical investigation of medical doctors’ reports on puinbyǒng. Special atten tion is paid to the newspaper patent medical advertisements of women’s disease, which were key sites in which new metaphors and images in volving the female body and illnesses appeared in colonial Korea. These advertisements on puinbyǒng produced by Korean and Japanese manu facturers are compared and contrasted. Finally, the study argues that Japanese producers of women’s medicine piggybacking on Japanese im perial power and its colonial ideologies constructed different images and languages of the colonial body to showcase the prowess of the empire and medicine, producing myriads of meanings of women’s bodies and diseases.