The Formation of the Premedical Course in Korea and the Instability of the Premedical Education Regime, 1945-1979.

Authors

Kyu Won Lee

Published in

Ui sahak. Volume 35. Issue 2. Pages 419-468.

Abstract

This article examines the formation and contested governance of Korea's two-year premedical course from 1945 to 1979. Drawing on records from the U.S. military government and the University of Minnesota as well as university documents, medical journals, newspapers, and student publications, it asks why this standard route into medical training repeatedly faced proposals for transfer, abolition, and integration. Focusing on Seoul National University (SNU), the article also considers variations by institutional type and region. The functionally hybrid system combined the post-Flexnerian American principle of placing general education and basic science at the university level with a progression model documented at SNU, where completion of the premedical course normally led directly to the four-year medical phase without a second competitive selection. This model more closely resembled the Preparatory Course at Keijō Imperial University and preparatory courses at some Japanese private universities than the old-system higher schools, which did not guarantee admission to a particular imperial university or faculty. No direct transmission is documented; "hybrid" is used here as an analytical rather than genealogical term. "Instability" refers not to the division of authority but to the failure to institutionalize comprehensive and durable coordination across student selection and quotas, administration and student records, curriculum, teaching, and decisions regarding completion and progression. The statutory 2+4 framework persisted even as coordination among these domains remained unsettled. A two-year standard for premedical education appeared in U.S. military government documents by early 1946. In 1947, Edwin L. Miller, the premedical supervisor, justified the two-year standard and elaborated on it while noting a U.S. trend toward three or four years of premedical study. The 1953 revision of the Enforcement Decree of the Education Act divided six-year medical education into two-year premedical and fouryear medical phases and assigned oversight of the premedical curriculum at comprehensive universities to colleges of liberal arts and sciences. It specified neither the aims of premedical education nor principles for its articulation with the medical phase. A late-1975 revision, effective in 1976, deleted this governance clause without establishing a general framework for curricular oversight. Governance disputes recurred from the late 1950s through the 1970s. In 1957, deans of medical colleges at national universities called for transferring premedical education to their colleges or abolishing the course; a newspaper reported a Higher Education Bureau proposal to place selected basic science subjects under medical-college administration. At SNU, a joint faculty committee coordinated policy in 1961; calls for medical-college governance and an undivided six-year structure resurfaced in the 1970s. A comparative study of premedical curricula at fourteen institutions, using 1976-1978 data and published in 1978-1979, reported administrative affiliation with colleges of liberal arts and sciences in eight cases, with colleges of medicine in five, and joint administration in one, with substantial variation in credits and curricula. Two 1967 tabulations of medical students in Seoul, based on different samples, show, at the aggregate level, both a preference for the course's affiliation with colleges of liberal arts and sciences and broad curricular dissatisfaction. The editorial board of a 1978 SNU student publication explicitly described a "lack of a clear sense of belonging." The central issue was not merely duration but who should provide premedical education, where it should occur, and how it should connect with basic and clinical medicine. Curricular integration, unification of the statutory 2+4 structure, and redistribution of institutional authority were distinct but interconnected questions. They remain relevant after the 2024 revision removed the mandatory 2+4 division while retaining the six-year duration, thereby permitting integrated curricula.

PMID:
42823805
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 02 Oct 2026.

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