Medicine is never only about treatment. It also carries culture, identity, and memory. Sometimes preserving a medicine is a way of preserving a people.
In this episode we visit with James Flowers to explore a potent moment in the history of Korean medicine and how Hanbang became part of Korea’s cultural resistance during the Japanese colonization. Not through politics or violence, but through preserving ways of healing, thinking, and living.
We discuss how medical ideas moved between Korea, China, and Japan, the role of Yangsheng in everyday life, and how Korean medicine resisted separating mind from body in the way modern systems often do.
This conversation also touches on the deeper question of how medicine lives within culture—not only through practitioners and institutions, but through families, daily habits, stories, and collective memory.
Listen into this conversation that weaves together history, medicine, identity, and the enduring cultural force of East Asian healing traditions.
Embrace reverence for the teachings in the old texts, while at the same time embrace irreverence by striking our own paths. With our own agency, we create and innovate medicine since our own clinical experience is our best teacher.
James Flowers, Ph.D
I am a Chinese Medicine practitioner and historian of medicine. I am currently a Brain Pool Research Fellow at the Climate-Body Institute, Kyung Hee University, and serve as Vice-President of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine. I am also Director of the International Society of Oriental Medicine and East Asia Editor of Asian Medicine. I hold a PhD in the History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Previously,
I operated my clinic in Sydney, Australia. I also taught Chinese medicine at the Western Sydney University and Sydney Institute of Chinese Medicine. I also served as the President of the Australian Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine Association for nine years.
I have published articles in journals such as the Social History of Medicine, and Asian Medicine. My current book project explores Eastern medicine in Korea during the first half of the twentieth century.
Visit James Flowers’ website and explore his work to learn more:
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