Indeterminable Therapy: Women, Cancer, and Radiation in Korea, 1930s-1970s

Analyzing narratives of women’s cancer in Korea from the 1930s to the 1970s, this talk traces how radiation therapy acquired shifting, gendered meanings. It asks how emerging medical professionals and patients conceptualized the contested status of X-rays, and how an expanding medical marketplace sought to domesticate new knowledge and practices of radiation. It also examines how radiotherapy’s military origins became entangled with nationalist portrayals of women’s health in South Korea. Drawing on newspapers, medical journals, and women’s magazines, the talk analyzes the therapeutic uses of X-rays, radium, and cobalt-60 on female bodies. By foregrounding persistent ambiguity in medical reasoning and treatment, it complicates narratives that cast medical progress for women as linear or unproblematic.

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About the speaker:

Soyoung Suh is an Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College. Her first book, Naming the Local: Medicine, Language, and Identity in Korea since the Fifteenth Century (Harvard University Asia Center, 2017), explores the evolving concept of locality in medical knowledge-making, focusing on the geo-cultural specificities of herbs, soil, and human constitutions. Her research has been published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry; Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity; Asia Pacific Perspectives; Korean Journal of Medical History; Journal of Korean History of Science Society; and the Journal of Korean Academic Society of Nursing Education. She is a co-researcher on a comparative history of illnesses project at Ewha Women’s University (2020–2026). Her current project, a second monograph tentatively titled Sudden Transition and Enduring Past: Breast Cancer in Korea, 1800–2010, explores the origins of gendered medical culture in modern Korea.