Category: Local Topics

There is a man who is called the Korean Schweitzer, but his real name is Chang Keeryo. He was a very special HERO in Busan.

He was born in a small city near Pyongyang, North Korea in 1911.

But back in 1911, South Korea and North Korea’s relationship was not what it is like today since this was before the Korean War (1950-1953).

In 1928, Chang Keeryo attended Kyungsung Medical School, which was the first westernized medical school to train Korean doctors. The school was founded in 1899, which was also the final year of the Joseon Dynasty.

However, things started to change in 1910, when Korea was under Japanese rule.

Beginning that year, many Japanese surgeons came to Korea to be professors at Kyungsung Medical School. It became very difficult for Koreans to find work being a professor. Equally difficult was the acceptance of Korean students at Kyungsung Medical School because Japanese professors favored Japanese students.

Chang Keeryo was one of the very few Korean medical students to attend the school. Later, he went on to graduate at the top of his class in 1932.

That year, he got married to Kim Bongsook and chose a stable career.

A few years later, he went back to school to get his Ph.D. at Nagoya University. He returned to Korea in 1945 when it became a newly freed country. As soon as he returned, he was appointed as the General Director of Pyongyang District Hospital and became a professor at Kim Ilsung Medical School.

He was the ONLY doctor who had PhD in North Korea at the time.

Everything went smoothly until the hospital where he worked was bombed during the Korean War.

After fleeing the explosion, Dr. Chang joined a group of refugees heading to Busan.

By that time, he was a father to three children and his second son was the only one who was with him. Unfortunately, his wife and two other children were left behind in North Korea.

Guess what he did first after arriving in Busan?

Well, he asked the U.S. army to let him use three of their tents. These tents were transformed into hospitals with one being called the “Gospel Hospital.” There he tended to countless refugee and homeless patients.

The Gospel Hospital later moved to the Yeongdo-gu district.

Patients from all over the country flocked to the clinic to receive care that was all paid for by Dr. Chang.

Generally, doctors make a well-deserved paycheck. However, Dr. Chang never spent money on himself. He only lived in a small rooftop room located in the hospital where he worked.

Later, he founded the Blue Cross Medical Cooperative in 1968, South Korea’s first ever medical cooperative. It was a private medical insurance program with more than 200,000 members. It wasn’t until 10 years later that the government introduced a national medical insurance program. Still, the Blue Cross Medical Cooperative is considered the best model for Korea National Insurance System.

That same year, he also founded Gospel Professional Nursing School.

Although he was already recognized as a competent surgeon, he studied with graduate students to catch up on all the up-to-date medical breakthroughs. Through such efforts, he greatly contributed to the development of medicine in Korea. He was the first one to succeeded in performing the first liver lobectomy in Korea.

But unfortunately, he lived a lonely life. He missed his wife and children so badly and always made sure to keep a photo of himself and his wife in his room. Tragically, he never had a chance to see his family again.

He passed away in 1995 at the age of 84.

To remember his devotion and hard work, “Chang Keeryo Memorial Hall” was opened on Ibagu Road (이바구길) in the Choryang-dong (초량동) area. If you are interested, please check it out.

Amidst the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, when so many of students’ opportunities to study abroad and conduct fieldwork were interrupted, I was lucky enough to successfully travel to South Korea twice. My first visit, in Fall 2020, I traveled as a study abroad student and was enrolled in Sungkyunkwan University. During that semester, I stayed in Seoul the entire time – I was too cautious to travel around the country and find myself contact-traced to a COVID case, or worse, become sick myself. However, during my second time in the country the following summer, I had more freedom, as during this visit, I was not travelling as an exchange student, but as a researcher.

In summary, my undergraduate research was concerned with seungmu dance. This dance form, unique to Korea, has a history going back to as early as the 7th century, and was once performed exclusively by Buddhist monks. However, in the modern day it is a secularized intangible national treasure of Korea, that is preserved as a folk dance to represent Korean national identity. My research aimed to illuminate seungmu’s transition from religious to secular dance through a combination of historical research, interviews with seungmu performers, and participant observation in the dance form myself. To do this, I had to travel to Busan, South Korea. Factoring in quarantine time, my initial plan had been to work in Busan for six weeks, with my first two weeks spent in the mandatory quarantine that was in place for all travelers entering South Korea.

Though the focus of my trip was centered around completing interviews, making connections with seungmu dancers, taking dance classes, and recording field notes, I was greatly assisted by a professor of dance at my home university and a native of Busan, Jiwon Ha! She was able to assist me and recommend the best cultural sites to visit in and around the Busan area. In between doing my research work, I was able to visit several of them. Among these, my visits to the Haedong Yongungsa Temple, Busan Art Museum, Gamcheon Culture Village, and two performances at the Busan Gugak Center were the standout activities of my trip. Though slightly outside of Busan, our excursion to the Bulguksa Temple in Gyeonju was also a highlight.

As a scholar of Korean Buddhism, the opportunity to walk around both Haedong Yongungsa and Bulguksa were an amazing experience for me. Haedong Yongungsa, an oceanfront temple with sprawling cliffsides, multiple ornate buildings, elaborate pagodas, hiking paths up to beautiful ocean overlooks, and many stone and golden Buddha and boddhisattvha statues, was breathtaking. I found myself floored by the scale, beauty, and age of this well-maintained religious site. For both Buddhists and non-Buddhists, I think that the spirituality embedded in the Haedong Yongungsa campus shines through. I would consider this ocean temple a must-see location for any visitor to Busan. Even despite the oppressive heat of the Korean summer (I believe it was near 95 degrees fahrenheit/35 degrees celsius the day I visited!), I felt the hike around this site to be completely worth it.

At the time of my trip to Busan I was also majoring in arts administration in college, and so my visit to the Busan Museum of Art was a special experience. Featuring displays of contemporary art of a variety of mediums, I was impressed by the range of art on exhibition as well as the architecture of the building itself. It wasn’t a huge art collection but was clearly curated with care and thoughtful intention. Any lover of contemporary art would enjoy an afternoon walking around this museum.

The Busan Gugak Center features performances of traditional Korean music and dance regularly – including seungmu – which is one of the reasons I selected Busan as the city to focus my research and interviews in. The tickets for these performances were very affordable and I was able to see performances there on two separate evenings. Both times, the roster of performances showcased music and dance based in traditional Korean arts and featured a variety of stages from different Korean dance traditions. I was truly blown away by the scale, talent, and artistry that the production pulled off for these shows and was also pleased that, for both evenings, the audience was full of other people appreciating these preserved art forms.

Individually, I also travelled to the Gamcheon Cultural Village, which delighted me. There is a helpful visitors center there, which features English-language pamphlets on the history and revitalization of the village. For someone who’s Korean is limited, the ability to walk comfortably through this colorful village at my own pace, without having to ask for help with navigation or pay anything to enter, was very welcome. However, in order to best appreciate the landscape, geography, and spectacle of the village, I do recommend that any traveler takes the time to buy a drink or snack from one of the many cafe’s that feature a rooftop patio and pauses to enjoy overlooking the vibrant landscape. I personally indulged in a much-needed slice of cheesecake after several hours walking around and the sense of peace I felt enjoying it while sitting on the rooftop patio of a small cafe and taking in the scale of the area is one of my fondest memories of all of my time in Korea.

For part of my trip, I was also staying in a hostel within walking distance from Haeundae Beach and enjoyed walking around the beachfront there each morning to exercise, relax, and start my day. Altogether, Busan was a beautiful place to visit. Between the mountains and oceans, temples and theatres, art and culture, and everything in between, it’s a city that has a lot to offer and I’m so grateful I had the opportunity to enjoy a small piece of it during my research travels.

On top of sightseeing, the main motivation for my visit, my research, was also a success and a publication of my final article is forthcoming this Fall! While my trip was unfortunately interrupted by several obstacles – extra quarantines, rainy weather, COVID-19 curfews and limitations – I think my experience proves that a memorable trip can still be made out of difficult situations.