Institutul de Istorie „Nicolae Iorga”, Programul IV „România și Europa în secolul XX” anunță pentru luni, 15 decembrie 2025, orele 11, comunicarea domnului Intaek Hong, Red Medicine and the Soviet Red Cross: Global developments of socialist public health in North Korea (1945-1965)

My dissertation traces one of the earliest ventures of the Soviet medical internationalism after the Second World War: the Soviet Red Cross hospitals and their provision of medical service, materials, and knowledge in postcolonial and postwar North Korea from 1945 to 1965. With archival materials including Soviet Red Cross documents on their hospital operations and a variety of North Korean and Soviet magazines on public health, I conceptualize the nineteen hospitals as a locus of medical knowledge circulation and examine how the Soviet and North Korean doctors facilitated argument and discourse on socialist medicine and modern hygiene with public, which further transformed North Koreans’ everyday life in terms of public health, gender, and environment. As a global history of medicine project with analysis of gender and environment, my research shows how the Soviet medical internationalism did not entail the establishment of identical public health systems across the socialist states and in the Global South, but rather prompted the intersection of plural visions on modernity, medical practices, and conflicting interests of overlooked historical actors: not only both Soviet and North Korean medical practitioners, but also North Korean women and youth, who participated in mass public health campaigns and projects.