UNESCO Memory of The World Register and Controversy
In 2009, UNESCO decided to add Dongui Bogam to the cultural heritage list due to its contribution as a historical relic and it was placed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme, becoming Korea's seventh cultural heritage to be thus included. However, doctors clashed over Dongui Bogam after the official listing. The Korean Medical Association (KMA) downplayed the book’s importance saying that “it shouldn’t be taken as anything more than a recognition of the book’s value as a historical relic. It should not be taken as an acknowledgement of traditional medicine for its superior effectiveness” Listing the fact that the book as full of quackery such as how to bore a son or how to make yourself invisible. The KMA emphasized that Dongui Bogam was merely a cultural artifact and not a science. The Association of Korean Oriental Medicine (AKOM) criticized the doctors of KMA for the lack of their appreciation of the influence of Dongui Bogam and history, saying it is necessary “to inherit and advance traditional medicine”.
Read more about this topic: Dongui Bogam
Famous quotes containing the words memory, world, register and/or controversy:
“Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn’t take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)
“Our fear that Communism might some day take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti-communism already has.”
—Anonymous U.S. Analyst In 1967. Quoted in “The Uses of Anticommunism,” vol. 21, published in The Socialist Register (1985)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)