존 P. 디모이아 교수

South Korea represents one of the world's most enthusiastic markets for plastic surgery. The growth of this market is particularly fascinating as access to medical care and surgery arose only recently with economic growth since the 1980s. Reconstructing Bodies traces the development of a medical infrastructure in the Republic of Korea (ROK) from 1945 to the present, arguing that the plastic surgery craze and the related development of biotech ambitions is deeply rooted in historical experience.

The Atoms for Peace program has typically been read as primarily a project of American Cold War ideology, supplying very little in the way of substantive materials and training to participating partner nations. This article challenges this position by bringing in the additional perspective of the recipient as an actor, in this case South Korea during the early stages of its post–Korean War reconstruction (1953– ). As Atoms for Peace arrived in Seoul in the late 1950s, a complex set of actors—on

This article interrogates the category “Cold War family planning” for the East Asian context (1945–1991), arguing that the category remains highly relevant while also reflecting a much longer regional history of demography and population studies. In this sense, the category is both useful and insufficient, especially if we fail to examine a revised periodization and a constructed nature for the category. If the category as constructed has its origins in a highly charged, ideological binary follo

Although South Korea's response to COVID-19 has received international praise, the nation's public health policy raises numerous privacy concerns, with a growing number of civil society groups joining the conversation. Following changes to public health law in 2015 in response to the MERS (Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome) crisis, South Korea's KCDC (Center for Disease Control) reconfigured its enforcement practice with measures tied to the movements of infected patients. New laws allow for t

This paper looks at the formation of a South Korean national health network by focusing on the introduction of an ambitious National Family Planning (FP) Program under President Park Chung Hee (1961–1968). The program, influenced in part by the model of its neighbor, Taiwan (Taichung), saw two pilot studies carried out in Koyang (rural, beginning in 1963) and Sundong-gu (Seoul metropolitan area, 1964–1966), before being carried to rural areas nationwide. If the program began with numerous echoes

10.1007/s12280-008-9054-5

In standard accounts of the origins of the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), or intermodal, shipping container, including Marc Levinson’s The Box and Alexander Klose’s The Container Principle, the story remains centered in Europe and North America, reflecting the issue emerging on the continent in the prewar era, and the post-war growth of the American trucking industry, associated with the expansion of federal highways. In contrast, this essay moves the focus to East and Sou

From Minnesota to Seoul? The DeWall Helix Bubble Oxygenator and Technology Transfer in Open-Heart Surgery, 1955–1965 John P. DiMoia (bio) In his inaugural speech of January 20, 1949, an address that has since been recognized as the origin of the Point Four program, U.S. president Harry Truman mobilized the material wealth of the American nation as part of an ambitious platform designed to share this bounty with the developing world. Specifically, he outlined his ideological differences with resp

In the aftermath of the Korean War (1950–53), the symbolic and material reconstruction of South Korea began, with much of the relief work assumed under the broad banner of the United Nations and its various affiliates and with a wide range of international aid and relief organizations participating. With this dramatic increase in the areas of new medical infrastructure, training, and pedagogy, it remains surprising that much of the scholarship to date has focused largely on medical practitioners

This article seeks to interrogate the tensions present with the descriptive phrase kwahak kisul (science and technology), often used to represent the growth of South Korean scientific and technical expertise in the mid-1960s, by tracing the material practice of postwar South Korean science and technology back to Japanese imperial formations (late 1920s) and forward to Cold War American institutions of higher learning. Focusing specifically on one community, a group of physical chemists studying

If Singapore has rapidly become known internationally for its work in recruiting large numbers of elite foreign scientists—or ‘foreign talent’ (FT) in Singapore’s terms—there remains much to learn about the state’s current biotech programme through prior work conducted at National University Hospital (NUH), recognising that recent ambitions derive in part from a much more modest set of origins. Specifically, Dr Ariff Bongso’s career mirrors this same series of incremental transitions, as he woul

This article interrogates the role of Korean military and civilian medicine during the Vietnam War (1965-1973), investigating its links to the period of reconstruction (1954-1960) following the Korean War, along with implications for the domestic population in the late 1960s and following. As early as the mid-1950s, civil society organizations were making contributions to aid other Asian nations, creating an Asian-Asian style of partnership often missing from the literature. Even as postwar Sout

This paper traces the diverse contexts of radiation protection from liberation in post-1945 South Korea to its professionalization by the early 1970s, using the emerging field of health physics (보건 물리학) as the focus. The Korean nuclear center, AERI (Atomic Energy Research Institute/한국 원자력 연구소, 1959), started two affiliates, RRIA (Radiation Research Institute for Agriculture/방사선 농업연구소, 1966) and RRIM (Radiation Research Institute for Medicine/방사선 의학연구소, 1963) in the early 1960s. In particular, RR