Chang Kee-ryo

Life

Chang was born in 1911 in Yongcheon County, North Pyongan Province. Sources differ on his birthday, giving it as either August 14 or October 5. After graduating from Keijō Medical College (Gyeongseong Medical College), he became a surgical assistant and lecturer at his alma mater in 1932. In 1940 he received a doctorate in medicine from Nagoya University in Japan. During the Japanese colonial period he worked as a surgeon at institutions including the Pyongyang Union Christian Hospital.

During the Korean War he moved south and settled in Busan. He reportedly never remarried, out of longing for the wife he had left behind in the North. According to one account, when the government offered him a special meeting with his family during the reunions of families separated between North and South, he declined, saying it would be unfair to other separated families. He died in Seoul on December 25, 1995.

Ministry and Achievements

• Gospel Hospital: In 1951 the Gospel Clinic, which treated refugees free of charge, opened inside the Third Yeongdo Church in Yeongdo, Busan, with Chang as its first director. The clinic is reported to have been founded jointly by Chang, Jeon Young-chang, and the Rev. Han Sang-dong, among others, and it is the forerunner of today's Kosin University Gospel Hospital. He served as director for twenty-five years, until June 1976.
• Liver surgery: In 1943 he performed the first successful operation in Korea to remove a cancerous mass from the liver. In 1959 he successfully performed a major hepatectomy (removal of a large portion of the liver) on a patient with liver cancer. In 1974 he led the founding of the Korean Association for the Study of the Liver and served as its first president. He trained physicians at Seoul National University, Pusan National University, the Catholic University of Korea College of Medicine, and elsewhere.
• Blue Cross Medical Insurance Cooperative: In May 1968 he launched the cooperative together with 723 members of twenty-three churches in the Busan area. Under the motto "Help your neighbors when you are healthy, and receive help when you are sick," the cooperative enabled members who paid small monthly premiums to receive medical care. Its first enrollee was Ham Seok-heon. In 1974 it was officially recognized by the government as a medical insurance cooperative, and when universal national health insurance was implemented in 1989, it transferred its members to the regional medical insurance program and dissolved.
• Other service: In 1976 he established Blue Cross Hospital in Sujeong-dong, Dong District, Busan, where he provided free care. He also helped found a number of welfare organizations, including the Korea Blue Cross Social Welfare Society, Busan Lifeline, and the Busan branch of the Korea Society for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled.

Influence on the Korean Church

Chang lived as a devout Christian throughout his life and is regarded as a man who put his faith into practice through medicine. In 1956 he formed a Bible study group in Busan known as the "Busan Gathering." The Blue Cross Medical Insurance Cooperative itself grew out of discussions with members of this group and a statement of purpose sent to more than one hundred churches. For this reason, the cooperative is cited as an example of a church community institutionalizing relief by sharing the burden of its neighbors' medical expenses. He was called "the Schweitzer of Korea," "the fool doctor," and "the father of the homeless sick." According to a widely known story, he would secretly let patients who could not pay slip out through the hospital's back door.

Assessment

Chang is highly esteemed as a physician who lived in honest poverty and cared for the poor. He received the Ramon Magsaysay Award, and after his death he was posthumously awarded the Order of Civil Merit, Mugunghwa Medal. The Blue Cross Medical Insurance Cooperative is often described as the starting point of medical insurance in Korea. Government medical insurance, however, began separately in 1977 as employee medical insurance for workplaces with five hundred or more employees. Consequently, there is ongoing debate over where the roots of the National Health Insurance should be traced.