Some Reflections on the History of Masked Societies in East Asia

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Anthropologist Christos Lynteris (2018) claimed the first use of face masks as a quarantine measure in the Manchurian Plague, while historian Sean Hsiang-Lin Lei (2010) described Wu’s “invention” of gauze masks against epidemics. Tomohisa Sumida’s paper in this issue and Meng Zhang’s new work (Zhang 2021) recast the Manchurian plague centered history.

² See also Goodman (2020).

³ Historians of science have also begun to address the rising interest in the history of artifacts and its intersection with public health and medicine (Strasser and Schlich 2020; Wailoo 2020). For a more collective form addressing the mask issues, see the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science’s The Mask-Arrayed project (https://themaskarrayed.net/home.html).

⁴ Sumida’s paper in this issue is based on such an initial study prepared for the workshop.

⁵ For the Chinese publication of his work, see Lei (2021).

⁶ Zhang changed direction in the course of writing a longer essay for the current forum. See Zhang in this issue.

⁷ For the expanded version, see Kim and Choi in this issue and their essay which appeared in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jaehwan Hyun

Jaehwan Hyun is an assistant professor at the Institute of General Education and the Interdisciplinary Program in Science and Technology Studies, Pusan National University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the history of science and environmental history. Now he is working on the history of human biology and environmental sciences with a focus on transnational connections between South Korea, Japan, and the United States after World War II. Jaehwan is also co-editing an anthology on the global history of masks, entitled Mask Panorama: The Politics and Science of Masks from the Black Death to COVID-19.

Akihisa Setoguchi

Akihisa Setoguchi is an associate professor at the Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University. He has been working on the relationship between technoscience and nature and has published books and articles on the history of biology in Japan. He wrote a book on the history of economic entomology, published as Gaichū no tanjō (2009), and co-authored a book on human-animal relations in Japan, which was titled Nihon no dōbutsukan (2013).

Mary Augusta Brazelton

Mary Augusta Brazelton is a University Associate Professor in Global Studies of Science, Technology and Medicine at the Department of History and Philosophy, University of Cambridge. She is the author of Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2019).