ABOUT THIS BOOK

An analysis of the use of mass media as a tool to control healthcare.

Socializing Medicine explores the intersections of medicine, health, and East Asian media. Interweaving archival research, audiovisual analyses, and theoretical insights from the emerging field of Health Humanities, the contributors reveal the multifaceted ways in which mass media—including photography, film, television, and live streaming—has been deployed as a tool for controlling medicine and health, privileging those with power and authority since the early twentieth century. Adopting anti-colonial and anti-capitalist perspectives, the contributors in this volume challenge the dominant mediations of health against the backdrop of imperialism, Cold War geopolitical tensions, and neoliberal capitalism. Collectively, they advocate for alternative understandings of medical culture through media productions that envision accessible and equitable healthcare practices.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Pao-chen Tang is a lecturer in film studies at the University of Sydney. Yuqian Yan is associate researcher of film, television, and new media at Zhejiang University. Ling Zhang is assistant professor of cinema studies at the State University of New York Purchase College.

REVIEWS

“This groundbreaking anthology diverges from Eurocentric models to span the celluloid past and digital present and investigate how East Asia offers not only illuminating examples of media shaping the socially based construction of health and medicine, but also some fascinating alternatives to state-centered efforts to bind the body to the nation.”

— Aaron Gerow, Yale University

“Expanding the boundaries of health humanities and media studies simultaneously, Socializing Medicine presents an enthralling picture of the ideological significance of medical media in East Asia. Its transnational and intermedial approach wisely recognizes that media, like viruses, rarely remain stable entities or respect national borders. An essential addition to the growing literature on the relationship between media, medicine, and power.”

— Scott Curtis, Northwestern University

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments viii
List of Contributors ix
Introduction 1
Pao-chen Tang, Yuqian Yan, and Ling Zhang
Section I: Medical and Media Imperialism
1. Contagious Disease and Visual Media in Colonial Korea 31
Jeehey Kim
2. Ink on the Silver Screen: Medical Culture and Poetic Voices in Spring
on the Small Island 54
Kathryn M. Tanaka
3. Deformed Bodies in Nuclear Family Rhetoric: The Hiroshima Maidens
Project in the Early Cold War 79
Yuki Obayashi
Section II: Socialist Medicine in Revolution
4. A Battle for Life: Bacteriophage Therapy and Socialist Medicine in the
Great Leap Forward 97
Lu Liu
5. From Curing to Revolutionizing: The Politics of Disability in Chinese
Socialist Medicine and Media 114
Chao Wang and Yuqian Yan
6. The Mass Biopolitics of Medicine in Socialist Chinese Films 131
Ban Wang
Contents
vi Contents
Section III: Precarious Ecology and the Body
7. Ecological Crisis and Pathologies of Modernity in the South Korean Films
Crowded and Zero Woman 151
Max Balhorn
8. Beyond Locality: Ke Chin-yuan’s Environmentalist Documentary and
Cultural Nativism 169
Pao-chen Tang
Section IV: Digital Embodiment in Neoliberal Capitalism
9. Live Streaming and Present.Perfect.: Digital Able-Bodiedness, Liveness,
and Disabilities 191
Chang-Min Yu
10. “The Most Calming Thing You Have Done on the Internet”: Healing
Vlogs and the Aesthetics of Li Ziqi 209
Lilian Kong
Bibliography 227
Index 254