"Making Seoul National University Hospital" by Hyung-Wook Park

This talk traces the evolution of Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH) from the 1960s to the 1980s. Starting as an impoverished governmental hospital of a postcolonial country, the hospital grew into a major South Korean biomedical corporation with many faculty members with overseas training, a new main building with latest technologies, and a larger independent budget supported by the National Health Insurance. This was possible due largely to Americans' funding amid the Cold War and Korea's industrialization during military dictatorship. This talk argues that an apparently successful outcome of these developments entailed many problems—including overcrowding, short consultation time, poor environment, staff exploitation, and various minor crimes—owing primarily to multiple unanticipated matters regarding patient numbers and costs, which ironically supported its medical research and education using patients.

Date: 24 April 2024

Time: 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Venue: NUS Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences AS1 04-01, Political Science Meeting Room

Speaker: Hyung-Wook Park

Chair & Discussant: Joey Long

Speaker Bio:

Hyung-Wook Park is an Associate Professor at the Nanyang Technological University and a visiting scholar at the National University of Singapore. He was trained as a historian of science and medicine at the University of Minnesota. After earning his doctoral degree in 2009, he got my first job as a lecturer in the history of medicine at the University of Durham, England. After a year, he moved to the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in Korea as an assistant professor, and then came to join the NTU faculty in December, 2012. His area of expertise is the history of the biomedical sciences and medicine in the modern world, including the problem of aging, health, cross-disciplinary communication, and religious interactions in scientific exchanges. AT NTU, he teaches history of science and technology (HH1004), history of the body (HH3019), health and illness in history (HH2007), and history of biomedicine (HH2027). He was awarded the Nathan Reingold Prize of the History of Science Society (2007).

Photo caption: Seoul National University Hospital.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

National University of Singapore, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, AS1 04-01 Political Science Meeting Room, Queenstown, Singapore