• The Journal of Korean Medical History
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.13-22
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• 2018

Understanding the purpose and results of a Korean Envoy's medical bureaucrat (attendant) travel to China. Unlike other Envoy's medical bureaucrats, envoy's trade made profits for those who participated. This article investigates the protocols of a Korean Envoy's medical attendant which include: (1) A prominent family member or high-ranking official does not participate in the Envoy's medical bureaucrat, either himself or his descendants. This denies the general theory that the medicinal material trade helped the economic status of medical officials. (2) Envoy's medical bureaucrat is a high percentage of interpreter bureaucrat in the households of father, mother, and wife. This suggests that the information about the envoy schedule and the benefit of the envoy may have been exposed in advance. This is related to the fact that the interpreter bureaucrat is the center of the envoy trade. (3) In the nineteenth century, envoy's medical bureaucrats were more frequent among close relatives, such as father-son relationship, than in the previous century. This study restored the lineage and purpose to the medical bureaucrat's travel to China, and provides a list of Envoy's medical bureaucrat through historical data, and analyzed the household and previous office. In this regard, it can be seen that some households, which are not dominant medical bureaucracies, have pursued profit through medicinal material trade. However, it is difficult to generalize to the whole of the medical bureaucracy.