B1. Medicine, Technology, and Representations in Global East Asia Chair: Sonja Kim, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Wayne Soon, University of Minnesota: Beyond Efficacy and Convenience: A History of the National Health Insurance Electronic IC Card in Taiwan
Ryan Moran, University of Utah: Measuring the Minds and Bodies of Laborers in Interwar Japan
Shu Wan, University at Buffalo: From Introduction to Indigenization: A Technology History of Hearing Aids in Republican and Early Socialist China
East Asia has become a powerhouse in technological advances and widely praised for its robust responses towards infectious diseases and healthcare inequities. Existing scholarship, however, has yet to seriously consider inextricable connections between technology, medicine, and photographic representations in East Asia, while downplaying myriad challenges that brought forth such progressive changes in a region marked by colonial and authoritarian pasts, religious valances, and industrial transformations. This panel aims to identify how Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese society and governments dealt with the challenges of using technology to shape medical practices and change representations of medicine. In contrast with typical perspectives of state and high-tech entities, this panel reveals unexpected agencies of technologists such as missionaries, criminal enterprises, insurance agents, actuarial science experts, and labor institute scientists in shaping medicine and society in the region.
Wayne Soon reveals how banks, criminal enterprises, photography studios, and precinct-level wardens did as much as the health insurance bureau, technology companies, semiconductor industry, hospitals, and government to normalize uses of smart health insurance integrated circuit cards in Taiwan. Ryan Moran traces collaborations between interwar Japanese industry, doctors, and scientists to understand the impact of labor on the body, with analysis based on intelligence testing and blood type. Across all of these papers, our panel seeks to illuminate technologies and technocratic encounters in non-state and state engagements with medicine, borne out in East Asia’s institutional, cultural, and social developments over time.
