Sonja M. Kim's Imperatives of Care: Women and Medicine in Colonial Korea is the first English-language monograph on women and health during the first half of the twentieth-century in Korea. It is a pathbreaking work on the histories of women and gender, medicine, missionary medicine, and health and illness during this period. Kim excavates the roles and experience of women in the emerging disciplines and professions of biomedicine and what can be broadly defined as health care sciences, including the domestic sciences, nursing, and gynecology. The book's special emphasis is on delineating the efforts of Korean women in shaping modern medicine and health care sciences from the last years of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) to the Japanese colonial era (1910–45).
The book highlights the processes by which Korean women became scientifically minded homemakers, physicians, nurses, midwives, and gynecologists. It brilliantly weaves together the complex challenges that they faced in negotiating...
