Jon Dunbar is a copy editor at The Korea Times, as well as editor of the Foreign Community page and curator of the Korea Times Archive. If you have suggestions for possible articles, or wish to contribute articles yourself, contact jdunbar@koreatimes.co.kr.
LAUGHING THROUGH HISTORY 28 'At Least He Got Over His Malaria'
A medical journal is on display at the Heo Jun Museum in Gangseo District, Seoul, January 2020. Courtesy of Robert Neff Collection
By Jon Dunbar
Editor’s note
Laughing Through History is a column that explores the roots of Korean humor through the joke book “Kkalkkal Useum,” originally published in 1916.
Today I’m translating a joke that targets a shortsighted man for his foolishness. In that way it’s similar to the last installment of this series, which translated a joke called “The Rice Cake Is Mine!” In this one, a father is so eager to treat his son’s illness that he doesn’t realize that the treatment is worse than the disease. Both these jokes fit with a superiority theory of humor. According to this view, the joke is funny because we can see how foolish the characters are being, and since we have a better understanding of the situation, we can laugh because we feel superior to them.
The joke I’m looking at today is different from the previous one, though, because this one is also about Koreans at the turn of the 20th century learning to navigate the modern world — in this case, modern medicine. The disease in question is malaria. Experts say the history of malaria can be difficult to trace because before modern germ theory was developed, words associated with malaria were used for a variety of fever-causing conditions not necessarily caused by the malaria parasite. But according to researcher Kim Jeong-ran, malaria was endemic in both Joseon-era and colonial-era Korea, mostly affecting children. It was not prioritized as a public health concern by colonial authorities, and was only brought under control by the Korean government in the 1960s.
The use of quinine as a treatment for malaria in Korea was pioneered in the late 19th century by the missionary and physician Horace Newton Allen, who established the predecessor of what is today Severance Hospital. In this joke, then, the father’s decision to treat his son’s malaria with quinine is a failed attempt to take advantage of modern medical science, as he does not sufficiently understand it. When the joke frames him as an object of mockery, part of what he’s being mocked for is an inability to navigate modernity. This implies that when a reader from the 1910s or 1920s laughed at it, part of their enjoyment came from a sense of their own superior understanding of the modern world.
“At Least He Got Over His Malaria”
An ignorant and uneducated man saw his son suffering from malaria. He must have heard that quinine was good for malaria, because he went to a pharmacy and had the pharmacist weigh out 20 grams, which he gave to his son all at once. But it was too much, and the boy died.
The man sobbed, “He may have died, but at least he got over his malaria.”
G.S. Hand is a graduate of the Translation Academy at LTI Korea and winner of the Fiction Grand Prize of the 53rd Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards, and has a master’s degree in Modern Korean Literature from Korea University. He lives in Seoul.