Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin Page B
Authors: Bradley K. Martin
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out of a propaganda campaign directed at health workers themselves, seeking to teach them by example to be more aware of their responsibility for “the welfare of the people” and to inspire them to practice “high ideology and morality in treatment.” 34
In case they might be inclined to forget their identity with the masses, doctors’ salaries were kept low. The maximum, for a physician with twenty years’ experience, was 180
won
a month—$105 at the official exchange rate and only double the average pay for North Korean wage earners in general. Then there was professional review, which appeared to consist at least in part of the “criticism sessions” typical in communist countries. While interviewing Dr. Han Ung-se, the Public Health Ministry’s director of treatment and preventive health care, I mentioned that workers in the tractor plant I had visited lacked safety goggles, helmets, hard-toed boots and guard plates for their metal-cutting machines. Han replied, a trifle ominously, that the doctor in charge of the plant’s health and safety “will be criticized.”
Saying that they-were following Kim Il-sung’s idea that “man is the most precious,” officials took great pride in having established a system of constitutionally guaranteed, free, cradle-to-grave health care. The U.S. Navy crewmen of the
Pueblo
had reported considerable experience with North Korean medical services, and their views were far from positive. 35 But having no real opportunity to verify the state of North Korean public opinion on the quality of health care, I could not rule out the possibility that there was more than a little truth in the official assertions that the country’s people were pleased with the system as it existed in 1979. The official comparison was always with what had passed for health care before establishment of the communist state— a comparison that permitted boasting of how much better a nationalistic, self-reliant, socialist system served the people. In the period preceding 1945, Dr. Han of the Public Health Ministry told me, the medical system reflected the Japanese view of Koreans as expendable cogs in the colonial economy. Consequently, there were no public hospital beds and fewer than three hundred private beds. Medical doctors (presumably excluding traditional practitioners) numbered fewer than thirty, with some records giving the figure as nine, Han said.
By the time of my visit, Han told me, North Korea had more than thirty thousand doctors—one for every four hundred people. 36 The North had ten medical colleges, a college of pharmacy and twelve other schools teaching nursing, dentistry, midwifery and so on. Hospitals ranged down to eleven-bed units serving villages. Physicians were organized to care for groups offamilies. Individuals’ medical record cards followed them throughout their lives. During the thirty-four years following liberation from Japanese rule, health workers had eradicated cholera, plague, malaria, syphilis and gonorrhea, they said. Average life spans had increased by decades, reaching seventy for men and seventy-six for women.
I was intrigued by a nationalistic element that was prominent in North Korean thinking about health care. I heard vague, unbacked assertions that Koreans were unique in their health-care needs and that—partly because of that uniqueness, and in line with
juche
philosophy—locally developed remedies were best. Even while subscribing to some three thousand foreign medical journals, Dr. Han said, the thirty-two medical-research agencies in North Korea “develop medical science according to the physical character of our people. A few of our doctors studied abroad, but mostly we educated them in our own colleges.” Han himself-was one of the local products, he said, having been a “worker” prior to 1945. “Of course those who studied abroad know well about world treatment methods,” he said, “but they don’t know well how to treat our own
In case they might be inclined to forget their identity with the masses, doctors’ salaries were kept low. The maximum, for a physician with twenty years’ experience, was 180
won
a month—$105 at the official exchange rate and only double the average pay for North Korean wage earners in general. Then there was professional review, which appeared to consist at least in part of the “criticism sessions” typical in communist countries. While interviewing Dr. Han Ung-se, the Public Health Ministry’s director of treatment and preventive health care, I mentioned that workers in the tractor plant I had visited lacked safety goggles, helmets, hard-toed boots and guard plates for their metal-cutting machines. Han replied, a trifle ominously, that the doctor in charge of the plant’s health and safety “will be criticized.”
Saying that they-were following Kim Il-sung’s idea that “man is the most precious,” officials took great pride in having established a system of constitutionally guaranteed, free, cradle-to-grave health care. The U.S. Navy crewmen of the
Pueblo
had reported considerable experience with North Korean medical services, and their views were far from positive. 35 But having no real opportunity to verify the state of North Korean public opinion on the quality of health care, I could not rule out the possibility that there was more than a little truth in the official assertions that the country’s people were pleased with the system as it existed in 1979. The official comparison was always with what had passed for health care before establishment of the communist state— a comparison that permitted boasting of how much better a nationalistic, self-reliant, socialist system served the people. In the period preceding 1945, Dr. Han of the Public Health Ministry told me, the medical system reflected the Japanese view of Koreans as expendable cogs in the colonial economy. Consequently, there were no public hospital beds and fewer than three hundred private beds. Medical doctors (presumably excluding traditional practitioners) numbered fewer than thirty, with some records giving the figure as nine, Han said.
By the time of my visit, Han told me, North Korea had more than thirty thousand doctors—one for every four hundred people. 36 The North had ten medical colleges, a college of pharmacy and twelve other schools teaching nursing, dentistry, midwifery and so on. Hospitals ranged down to eleven-bed units serving villages. Physicians were organized to care for groups offamilies. Individuals’ medical record cards followed them throughout their lives. During the thirty-four years following liberation from Japanese rule, health workers had eradicated cholera, plague, malaria, syphilis and gonorrhea, they said. Average life spans had increased by decades, reaching seventy for men and seventy-six for women.
I was intrigued by a nationalistic element that was prominent in North Korean thinking about health care. I heard vague, unbacked assertions that Koreans were unique in their health-care needs and that—partly because of that uniqueness, and in line with
juche
philosophy—locally developed remedies were best. Even while subscribing to some three thousand foreign medical journals, Dr. Han said, the thirty-two medical-research agencies in North Korea “develop medical science according to the physical character of our people. A few of our doctors studied abroad, but mostly we educated them in our own colleges.” Han himself-was one of the local products, he said, having been a “worker” prior to 1945. “Of course those who studied abroad know well about world treatment methods,” he said, “but they don’t know well how to treat our own
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