The Limits of Innovation: Provincial Hospitals in Colonial Korea, 1925-1945, with a Focus on the Role of Disease Control
Authors:   The Korean Association for the Social History of Medicine, Lee Bangweon 
Published: November 2023

This study attempts to identify changes in the local medical environment and their limitations, focusing on “disease treatment,” one of the functions of provincial hospitals in the Japanese colonial era. Until 1945, when Korea was liberated from Japan, the provincial hospitals during the Japanese colonial era treated diseases of Japanese and Koreans as a central local medical institution. Until the liberation period, the size of each of the 46 provincial hospitals established nationwide varied widely, but the number of doctors continued to increase and the medical department was further subdivided. Jahye Hospital, the predecessor of the provincial hospital, classified patients into general patients who could afford to pay for the treatment and charity patients, enacted regulations to treat economically poor Koreans free of charge, and in 1912 began to provide circuit treatment for patients in remote areas without medical services. However, after 1920, after switching to a provincial clinic, after 1930, and after the end of the 1930s, the proportion of Koreans treated in provincial hospitals, most of whom were charity patients, plunged to 3.75 percent by 1941, and the number of clinics conducting circuit treatment decreased and became nominal.
Provincial hospitals also played a role as a base hospital for treating diseases that were difficult to treat in general hospitals, such as infectious diseases, morphine addiction, and tuberculosis. Quarantine buildings for infectious diseases were installed from the beginning, and patients were quarantined when infectious diseases broke out. However, most of the quarantine rooms in the provincial hospitals were for general patients, and only the provincial hospitals in Anseong and Pyongyang had beds for charity patients with infectious disease, but their total number was only 14, which was very insignificant. As a result of the Japanese colonial government’s policy on morphine addicts in Korea, morphine-addicted patients were forcibly admitted to designated provincial clinics after 1927, treated for several months, and discharged after full recovery. Through this process, the Japanese authorities in the late 1930s estimated that morphine addicts had disappeared. An active national policy for tuberculosis patients began in 1936. Some provincial hospitals established separate isolation rooms for tuberculosis patients, but the number of beds was very insufficient compared to the number of tuberculosis patients distributed across the country at that time, and there were no beds for charity patients with tuberculosis.
The provincial hospitals during the Japanese colonial era carried out various activities to treat diseases as a local hub hospital where people could experience Western medicine, but Koreans suffered from communication problems and ethnic discrimination, and the actual benefits were largely different from those advocated by the Japanese authorities as there were fewer opportunities for charity treatment for Koreans who were economically deprived at that time.