About

My name is Jiyong Park. I am a neurosurgeon. I live in Seoul and work in Gimpo.

I treat spinal disease, both surgically and through pain management. My particular focus is endoscopic spine surgery, specifically UBE. I completed my residency at Ewha Womans University Mokdong Hospital, spent two years as a fellow at Wooridul Spine Hospital near Gimpo Airport, and now practice at Madichuk Hospital.

I also write on health policy, though the subject carries so much local context that I seldom attempt it in English. Trainee doctors across the country stopped work in 2020 over a set of government proposals, and I took part, serving that year as vice president of the Korean Intern Resident Association. I now run an organization that works to bring physicians into public debate.

People sometimes ask where I sit politically, and the honest answer is that I was raised on both sides of that line. One of my parents comes from Jeolla, the other from Gyeongsang — the two regions that have long anchored opposite poles of Korean politics. An American might imagine being raised by one parent from California and one from Texas. Both of my parents were civil servants, and my father served in senior positions in a ministry close to politics.

That did not make our house a place where politics was discussed. My parents held opposing views and had long since settled on not airing them in each other’s company. What I received instead were separate conversations, one parent at a time, each spoken carefully and never in front of the other. Neither of them was a partisan. One leaned center-right and the other center-left, and neither was trying to recruit me. I learned the subject twice, from two directions, in measured terms both times.

A related interest is philosophy, political philosophy above all, and particularly where it meets questions of gender. Debate on these questions in Korea tends to split into two camps. On one side are those who have imported Western theory more or less whole. On the other are those who object that the theory does not describe conditions here. The objection is often a fair one. It is also frequently made by people who have not read the work they are objecting to, which means the two sides rarely meet on the same ground long enough to disagree usefully. I try to find where that ground might be. That has pushed me to read more widely than I otherwise would have, and of contemporary thinkers I owe the most to Martha Nussbaum.

My acquaintance with East Asian philosophy is no deeper than that of any reasonably well-read Korean. I doubt that will remain the norm. The serious reappraisal of that tradition has barely begun, and I expect it will in time become material that philosophers elsewhere take up in earnest, in much the way Korean popular music stopped being treated as a curiosity.

In academic settings I write as Jiyong Iruon Park, and this site takes its address from that middle name. Korean names overlap often — several physicians share mine — so I added a middle name to distinguish myself from them. My passport still reads Jiyong Park. Given names here are now chosen to sound well in English, and duplicates are multiplying fast enough that I expect the law will have to change.

This site is where the writing lives. Some pieces also appear in English on Substack. Those begin as machine translation and then take hours of line-by-line revision, so the English is mine even where the first draft was not.

Everything here is my own view. It does not represent my employer or any organization I belong to.