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.