An Introduction to War, Medicine and Modernity in East Asian Conflicts

Abstract

Despite Hippocrates’ statement that “war is the only proper school for a surgeon,” contemporary historians of medicine have long overlooked the complicated relationship between the two. The interconnection between war and medicine has, however, covertly entered military and medical discourse for centuries. In Susan Sontag’s study on the spread of syphilis and tuberculosis during and at the close of the First World War, she references public education campaigns where diseases were cast as an invasion of the body. She states that “military metaphors became a credible and precise means of conceptualizing disease” (Sontag 1990: 97). Additionally, the characteristics of modern counterinsurgency add to the increasingly prominent role of the medical sciences in shaping the viewpoints of national security. Some forms of warfare cast the enemy as a disease of the societal body against which protection can be procured. Research and even political propaganda have begun to explore the strategies in which national security is being redefined as a medical problem, as well as the deepening connections between medicine and warfare (Elbe 2010; Howell 2011). The bio-politics in Nazi-era Germany significantly illuminated how terrifying the application of a medical metaphor to national security and war could be. For example, Andreas Musolff’s study on Hitler’s Mein Kampf focused on “the conceptualization of the German nation as a human body that had to be cured from a deadly disease caused by Jewish parasites” (Musolff 2007: 21), Metaphors of disease and medical treatments that are used to characterize the insurgency-counterinsurgency dynamic constantly elucidate this hybrid character of modern war. Treating the brutal nature of warfare and the philanthropy of