"Naming the Local uncovers how Koreans domesticated foreign medical novelties on their own terms, while simultaneously modifying the Korea-specific expressions of illness and wellness to make them accessible to the wider network of scholars and audiences. Due to Korea’s geopolitical position and the intrinsic tension of medicine’s efforts to balance the local and the universal, Soyung Suh argues that Koreans’ attempts to officially document indigenous categories in a particular linguistic form required constant negotiation of their own conceptual boundaries against the Chinese, Japanese, and American authorities that had largely shaped the medical knowledge grid. The birth, decline, and afterlife of five terminologies—materia medica, the geography of the medical tradition, the body, medical commodities, and illness—illuminate an irresolvable dualism at the heart of the Korean endeavor to name the indigenous attributes of medicine. By tracing Korean-educated agents’ efforts to articulate the vernacular nomenclature of medicine over time, this book examines the limitations and possibilities of creating a mode of “Koreanness” in medicine—and the Korean manifestation of cultural and national identities."

Examines the role of "locality" in medical innovations in Korea by tracing the origins of five key medical terms. Emerging within specific moments from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, each term represents both the aspirations and limitations of registering the local in the existing configuration of Korean medicine.--

Surnames have long provided key links in historical research. This ground-breaking work shows that English christian names are also significant for those researching local communities and family history - and that they are a fascinating topic in their own right. Did you know, for instance, that the names Philip and Thomas were once used for girls? Or that there was a woman called Diot Coke in 1379? When George Redmonds became interested in christian names, he found that the information on his own name in dictionaries was contradicted by local records and that the standard works' emphasis on etymology only gave part of the story. Half a lifetime's research has convinced him that every christian name has a 'pedigree', which can be regional, local or even centered on one family. Here he explores the implications of this for both amateur and academic historians. Drawing on examples from Anne to Zaccheus, he covers a wealth of topics including the stabilisation of first names as surnames; the influence of individuals, parents, godparents and communities on naming; the popularity of names over the last 700 years; and more recent changes in naming practice. He challenges many published assumptions - and offers new insights into the customs and attitudes of our ancestors from the Middle Ages to the present day.

CD-ROM contains: all source code and datafiles from the book