We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Rethinking Breast Mountain (Yuam): Surgical Treatments of Breast Cancer in South Korea, 1959-1993.
- Authors
Soyoung Suh
- Abstract
By analyzing premodern medical treatises, professional journals of Korean surgeons, and a patient's memoir, this paper aims to complicate an understanding of the innovations of surgical treatments of breast cancer in South Korea from 1959-93. The South Korean conceptualization of breast cancer as a "suddenly emerging yet properly controllable epidemic" manifests the promise of biomedical development, thereby conjuring up a brighter future for Korean women. However, this forward-looking portrayal of breast cancer often discounts past experience, thereby ignoring the contested views of the causes and treatments of the disease. This essay intends to historicize the changing connotations of breast ailments and surgical intervention, while tracing the Korean accommodation and subsequent abandonment of William Stewart Halsted's (1852-1922) radical mastectomy procedure. Female patient Yi Hyo-suk's response to her own radical mastectomy in the late 1970s encourages us to contemplate issues around the patient-doctor relationship, moral grounds of secrecy, the possibility and limitation of a patient's activism, and the religious and commercial meaning of seeking alternative medicines. Rethinking the manifold narratives about surgical intervention across time and profession helps us begin a dialogue that can raise hope beyond an increased five-year survival rate.
- Subjects
BREAST cancer diagnosis; BREAST cancer patients; COLD War, 1945-1991
- Publication
Asia Pacific Perspectives, 2016, Vol 14, Issue 1, p3
- ISSN
2167-1699
- Publication type
Article