The University of Hawai’i Press has issued the sixteenth title in the Hawai’i Studies on Korea series, co-published with the Center for Korean Studies since 2000.

The new title is Imperatives of Care: Women and Medicine in Colonial Korea by Sonja M. Kim. Kim is associate professor of Asian and Asian American studies at the State University of New York, Binghamton.

Kim’s work is the first monograph on public health priorities in maternal and infant welfare in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Korea. In it she outlines the professionalization of medicine, nursing, and midwifery, tracing their evolution from new legal and institutional infrastructures in public health and education. She also investigates women’s experiences as health practitioners and patients, medical activities directed at women’s bodies, and the related knowledge and goods produced for and consumed by women.

The book draws on archival sources, some not previously explored, to foreground the ways individual women met challenges posed by uneven developments in medicine, intervened in practices aimed at them, and seized the evolving options that became available to promote their personal, familial, and professional interests.

According to Kim, medicine produced, and in turn was produced by, gendered expectations caught between the Korean reformist agenda, the American Protestant missionary enterprise, and Japanese imperialism.

Imperatives of Care is available directly from the University of Hawai’i Press, through book dealers, and through on-line services such as Amazon.