Writing Medical History in Taiwanese Context

This paper aims to review the writing of Taiwanese medical history and reveals its characteristics in different stages. Before 1945, writing medical development was a way to declare the success of Japanese colonial rules. To the medical practitioners in colonial Taiwan, it was a way to identify them being a contributors to build a CIVILIZED AND SCIENFICALIZED Taiwanese society. This attitude continued until the 1960s. Historians and sociologists provide more angles and explanations to understand Taiwan’s medical past. In the new weave of writing Taiwanese medical history, patients, supportive manpower (i.e. nurses, medical assistant, midwife etc.) are all eventually received attention by the new generation of researchers. Moreover, unlike in the per-war era (1895-1945), regular physicians, medical schools, and many non-meds after the 1980s replace doctors and officials of the authorities to illuminate their feeling about medical development in Taiwan. From different angles and personal experiences, writing medical history in Taiwan starts a new page that would pass Taiwanese colonial memory up today and link professional understanding with laymen’s feeling. This paper would be a preliminary try to review the efforts of writing medical history in the past and hope to show a promising future of medical history in Taiwan.