This writing is meaningful examined the diseases which were raised in modern space in Chae, Man Sik’s essay. In his essay, he depicted not only the illnesses of his families suffering from respiratory diseases, but also the diseases of those witnessed in modern spaces, especially mental hospitals and trains. He paid attention to those people who showed symptoms similar to his own disease because he had a coercive gaze of them. Therefore, Chae, ManSik’s behavior to examine and describe their illness can be connected with how he perceived and viewed modern space.
In his family diseases, he focused mainly on pleurisy, hematoma, dysentery, and whooping cough, which his nephews suffered. Because these diseases are related to the respiratory tract and contagious. Adults in his family members also had a history of diseases such as sex, flu, uterine hematoma, and abnormal pregnancy. Unfortunately, the vaccines to treat these diseases were not available at the time. Thus, his family members had to despair at the end of life. Also, these diseases are highly contagious, causing huge losses at the national level.
In addition, diseases in modern space are prominent in his essay through patients witnessed in mental hospital and trains. Chae, ManSik recognized that the price of medicine for treating diseases was too expensive at the time, and he noticed that many modern people were devastated by opium. In particular, as a journalist, he was interested in diseases of schizophrenia (anorexia, anorexia, depression, etc.) that had to be separated while being monitored in the psychiatric ward. Also, on the train, he watched closely for pulmonary tuberculosis and beriberi seen in the women who were worked in the factory.
In short, with the urbanization of modern space in the 1930s, people were exposed to poor conditions, and people could not be free from the numerous viral germs caused by urbanization. In particular, due to the industrial environment and labor environment that forced the community to live in a collective community, the infectiousness of the disease was extremely high. Also vaccines were expensive or unpopular, so many people couldn’t be cured. Therefore they had to go down to the provinces and endure by themselves. In addition, National policy awared problems of disease, but it didn’t execute or solve the problems by policy. And this is another cause of disease problems.