Heping Hospital under the shadow of SARS: An introspection by Taiwanese history of medicine

• Main Authors: Lin,Zheng–Jie, 林政杰
• Other Authors: Liu,Shi–Yung
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/ft28bk

碩士 === 東吳大學 === 歷史學系 === 104 === The epidemic, SARS in 2003, brought enormous shocks to Taiwanese society. The sudden lock-up action of Heping Hospital due to quarantine emergency tremendously impacted to both the public and its long term trust to medical circles. The paper aims to extend interpretation to reveal possible mechanism of breaking social trust to medical elites by essential phenomena blinking in the period to quarantine Heping Hospital. With the case of Heping Hospital during SARS period, this study means to explain many contemporary issues in modern medical care and public health systems in Taiwan from the angles of historical prospects. Since the modern medical system was introduced in colonial Taiwan, the government has tried every strategies to win the public trust in scientific medicine. The result could be however controversial. To doctors, their better socio-economic status thus depended on governmental actions and promotion of scientific medicine. As unknown medical crisis like SARS arose, such confidence could soon collops due to the disability of medical circle and government to deal with such crises. Once the disability to control epidemics continue, social trust the medical system in Taiwan could fall fracturing general doctor-patient relationship. Despite the conflict on the doctor-patient relationship has been realized awhile, no major studies have been done to search its roots in the history of medicine in Taiwan. In the case of the quarantine of Heping Hospital, the conflicts on doctor-patient relationship becomes much severe, leaves a gateway to explore the potential historical factors of the broken relationship. Major materials of newspapers, magazines, interviews, and academic surveys are applied to analyze the fractured doctor-patient relationship. Generally speaking, like all contemporary events succeed their heritage events in history, the conflicts and disputes during the quarantine period of Heping Hospital was actually an old wound beneath the new pain. This paper aims to portray the top-down process to promote scientific medicine since the colonial Taiwan is exactly the means to understand all the chaos happened during that period. By doing so, the historical study might contribute to rebuild better social trust to medicine nowadays.