- Description
Most scholarship on the history of Taiwanese society considers 1945 as either a starting point or an ending point. The history of the medical profession offers us a rich array of phenomena to trace transitions in Taiwanese society across this divide, in a way that is empirically grounded and analytically subtle. Formal medical education began in colonial Taiwan in 1897. What began as an intensive program in first-aid soon expanded to a formal medical school in 1902 and eventually became a part of the Japanese imperial university system in 1928. While the Japanese medical profession is most commonly associated with its German influences, colonial medicine in Taiwan also adopted several aspects of British tropical medicine, creating a truly unique hybrid. Under this system, generations of medical professionals in Taiwan were guided by professional criteria of German medicine in general practice and British standards in tropical medicine until the 1950s.
