[삶의 뜨락에서] smallpox

Even before and after the Korean War, when I was young, I could sometimes see scars called bear marks on the faces of people who had suffered severely from an infectious disease called smallpox. This smallpox epidemic is very contagious, with a mortality rate of more than 30%, severe fever, rashes all over the body, and itching, resulting in scars on the skin.

According to my mother, my mother also suffered from a high fever and rash as a result of the smallpox infection when she was young and had not been vaccinated. Fortunately, she recovered without excessive scarring. However, her mother and her mother’s cousin, who lived in the same village, died of high fever while suffering from smallpox, and her mother said that she cried endlessly when she saw the death of her cousin, whom he loved and cherished.

In the late Joseon Dynasty, the path to becoming a doctor was not open to Korean women. After graduating from the Department of English at Ewha University, her mother went to Severance Nursing Training Center to become a nursing student. My mother was very good at learning from a very young age, so she received a scholarship from a Canadian missionary. .

Even after that, he wore an improved hanbok and traveled around the world, occasionally receiving attention from foreigners, but he did not hesitate to study hard and did well in any subject.

At that time, there was a trend in Korean society where parents gave birth to multiple children and raised them. So, it was a time when you could often hear that child farming was half-threshing farming.

Mothers in Korea had to watch their babies die before their eyes before they could live out their lives given the little ones they gave to the world after growing them for nine months in their wombs after giving birth. Looking back on the life of a cousin who died after suffering from a severe fever due to parents who did not know about vaccination in a hurry, not only did they feel very sorry that all of this could have been avoided by taking precautions, but also made the task their mission entrusted to them. He said he was determined to dedicate the rest of his life to preventive medicine.

After returning from Canada, my mother, with Miss Rothenburg, an American nurse missionary, traveled all over the country, starting with Seoul at the Taehwa Women’s Social Center, focusing on hygiene and prevention education for women.

In recognition of this merit, her mother was the first professional nurse in Korea with a degree in public health, and in 1959 she received the Nightingale captain through the wife of President Syngman Rhee, Francesca. My mother’s life I have seen is, in a nutshell, a purpose-driven life itself, as in Pastor Rick Warren’s book.

Jinsoo Hwang / Essayist