From national physicians to medical modernists: Taiwanese doctors under Japanese rule.

In order to explore the contingent relationship between professionalism and colonialism, this dissertation investigates the radical transformations of Taiwanese doctors' public activity during Japanese occupation. I focus on how these doctors' actions and discourses evolved over three periods. My analysis suggests a set of mechanisms that propelled the changes. In the first period (1920-1931), strong professional autonomy, a liberal, humanist professional culture, and critical discourses in civil society mobilized doctors in anti-colonial activities. In the second period (1932-1936), the decrease in professional autonomy and the increase in civil regulation demobilized these doctors. Beginning in the second and continuing into the third period (1937-1945), doctors' modernist professional culture and promising career opportunities further co-opted them. While these mechanisms generated the conditions for doctors to become anti-colonial, demobilized, or co-opted, these conditions did not dictate the specificity of doctors' public identities. Doctors drew upon their experiences in particular historical junctures to imagine and articulate their identities. They developed a public identity as national physicians in their anti-colonial activities, lost this legacy later, and constructed a new identity as medical modernists as they became co-opted. While focusing on a specific historical period, the dissertation addresses two broader theoretical problems. Focusing on how profession/ethnicity relations are contextualized in state/society relations, I argue that the mobilization of professionals is often embedded in multiple sets of collective action. Thus, colonial professionals tend to de-naturalize their political goals and develop fluid collective identities. This proposition reinstates professions into the heart of civil society. Furthermore, my study of colonial professionals also documents the incompleteness of both colonial domination and resistance, and, accordingly, proposes a hybridization perspective for colonial studies. The hybridization perspective compels us to recognize how the assimilating and destabilizing forces blend to create the colonial hybrid, and how it generates the potential for new types of imagination, political energy, and social identities.Ph.D.Asian historyHealth and Environmental SciencesHealth sciencesPolitical scienceSocial SciencesSocial structureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130052/2/9712023.pd