For the past 50 years, we have done our most to look away from the unbelievable injustice inflicted on our brethren on Cheju by Rhee Syngman's dictatorship under US tutelage. It is ironic that the Korean people know more about the Mylai Massacre in Vietnam than the April 3rd Massacre in Korea. Indeed, the Korean people are more interested in the Mylai than in their own massacre in which some 40,000 innocent people were ruthlessly murdered by their own government troops. The fact that our people pay more attention to foreign happenings than to our own reflects poorly on our nationhood. I will attempt to provide answers to these and other disturbing questions from a medical point of view.
Medicine deals with the health and ills of our society.
For a long time, medical practitioners concentrated on curing patients. As our society grew more complex, various elements of our society began to affect our patients' health. This forced medical workers to view the interaction between the society and their patients. In the 20th century, we had two world wars, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. The medical community became more concerned with social issues associated with warfare beyond its traditional patient care.