Sirhak Medicine: Measles, Smallpox, and Chŏng Tasan

The author examines the place of Tasan Chŏng Yagyong in the sirhak tradition. He focuses on Tasan's medical work, particularly as it related to Neo-Confucian medical theory and to the smallpox and measles epidemics that periodically ravaged Korea in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Baker traces Tasan's contact with Chinese and Western medicine, and discusses the manner in which he approached the two traditions. The author concludes that Tasan was not an empirical scientist in a modern sense, but was a rationalist seeking to appropriate successful Western medical practices within the framework of a conservative understanding of the Confucian tradition.