Although Silhak (Confucian) scholars had been studying and experimenting with foreign medical ideas since the 17thc and were modulating Korean healing practices, modern medicine in Korea continues to be dated in the Severance Hospital system at the end of the 19th century. Similar fusion and integration evident in China’s native physicians who blended mind-body practices (Tai Chi) with new (Western) ideas are lost to the history of modern medicine as conventionally narrated. As healing ideas and materials were exchanged around maritime circuits, Ajar princes in Iran systematically incorporated “modern” science into their repertoire, and Africans were continuously involved in the circulation of medical ideas that presaged and contributed to modern medicine. By the mid-19th century, young men and women from around the world were studying medical sciences at imperial institutions, graduating to practice as physicians, nurses, technicians, and dispensers. Yet others acquired medical competences through apprenticeships, even as native systems adapted to the flow of medical knowledge. Globally, medical expansion, including training, infrastructure, technology, and public health coincided neatly with European colonialism and historiology, which began to report modern medicine as racially European. The dominant account of modern medicine situates it in European culture from where it was introduced or imposed on others.
The implications of the dominant narrative are evident in the denial of historical agency of non-Western medical practitioners and in the enduring racism of modern medical culture which continues to reduce non-Western healing systems under labels of traditional, alternative, biomedicine, etc., in a bid to authenticate racial designation. The articles in this panel invite a decolonization of the historical narrative, by rendering how ideas of modern medicine evolved almost contemporaneously in different parts of the world and in a continuity of the global circulation of ideas from before European colonization.