Abstract
In many periods of Korean history, state-sponsored medical books played a crucial role in terms of distributing medical knowledge as well as systemizing medical information. This study uses comparative analysis to examine the tables on contents of state-sponsored medical publications in Korea. These tables of contents reveal the placement and categorization of medical knowledge, which implicates the ways in which diseases were classified. Historically, Korean medicine has been influenced by Chinese medicine, and at the same time, it has made steady efforts to localize Chinese medicine. This paper argues that Korean medicine adopted the Chinese styles of categorizing medical knowledge in the middle of 15th century for the first time and shows the tendency to Koreanize medical knowledge through the early 17th century. In the 18th century the Complete Records of Medicine (醫部全錄) shows the trace of referring the style of Korean medical book, the Treasured Mirror of Eastern Medicine (東醫寶鑑) in terms of categorizing medical knowledge.