• The Journal of Korean Medical History
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.135-147
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• 2022

Sin Dae-woo was a scholar representing the Ganghwa School in the late Joseon Dynasty. He was Jeong Je-du's grandson-in-law and also in charge of organizing Jeong Je-du's collection of writings. His three sons had a particularly close relationship with their father, so even when they published a collection of writings after his father's death, the names of the three were combined and marked as Jin-jak-shin. The records they left include Seokcheon Il-seung, who described the history of the family along with the collection of writings, Seongdo Il-rok, a diary of the time of Seongcheon Busa, and many letters exchanged over time. These records draw attention as they contain records of medical life, such as eye diseases that the family suffered, infectious diseases that caused many casualties, and Yakro (distilled herbal essence) that showed records of being used for treatment at the time. In this paper: 1) We examine the medicines, prescriptions, acupuncture, and medication used to treat eye diseases. 2) We carefully examine the epidemic, the responses of the parties to it, and the attitudes of those who stood at the boundary between death and life. 3) We look for clues to the use of Western-origin drugs called Yakro. Intellectuals of the time looked deeper into Lee Kyugyung's book and Seo Yu-gu's book on how they were reflected in Joseon's medical life. In conclusion, in the 18th and 9th centuries, we see that the influential families of the Ganghwa school freely brought in famous acupuncturists, used prescriptions that were included in medical books or not, and used Yakro from western origin that were not traditional methods of Joseon. Thus, we reveal that doctors of the Joseon had the capacity to pursue their medical life more actively and had open-minded exchanges than our existing perceptions.