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Philip Jaisohn is the Anglicized name taken up by Seo Jae Pil (서재필; 徐載弼). He was born in 1864 as a second son of a county magistrate in Bosung (보성; 寶城) in southwestern Korea. He passed the government examination and became a junior official in 1882. The following year, he was sent to Japan where he studied at both the Keio Gijuku (the forerunner of the Keio University) and at the military academy for two years. After returning to Korea in 1884, he was involved, along with Kim Ok Kyun and others, in a coup d'état in December that year to overthrow the old order and was appointed as the War Minister by the revolutionaries. The revolutionary regime, however, was toppled within three days by an intervention of Chinese forces and Seo/Jaisohn was forced into an exile in Japan, and later, in the United States.
In the United States, he began using the Anglicized name "Philip Jaisohn," studied medicine at Columbia Medical College (later George Washington University Medical School), receiving the medical degree in 1892 (the first Korean to receive a Western medical degree). Later, he married Muriel Armstrong, a niece of former President James Buchanan, in 1894.
In 1896, the plotters of 1884 were pardoned and Seo/Jaisohn returned to Korea at the invitation of Park Young Hyo, another former conspirator of 1884 who had just been appointed Prime Minister to serve as an advisor to the Korean government. In Seoul, he founded the Independence Club (독립협회) and established a newspaper, the Independence (독립신문), to promote Korean nationalism and diffusion of Western ideas. His newspaper, in particular, was the first private, all-Korean newspaper in Korea--other Korean newspapers continued to use significant numbers of Chinese characters for decades.
Independence Club was particularly critical of corrupt and anti-democratic behavior by members of Korean government, a fact that earned the organization much displeasure from the official quarters. The government in 1898 accused the Club of seeking to overthrow the monarchy and establish a Republic. Following the arrest of seventeen of its leaders in late 1898, the organization was formally ordered disbanded on December 25, 1899. Seo/Jaisohn was forced to return to the United States once again.
Back in the United States, Seo/Jaisohn both practiced medicine and became a successful businessman in Philadelphia. Following the formal annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910, Jaisohn collaborated with various Korean exiles in United States to help advance the cause of Korean independence, organizing, among others, the organization Friends of Korea in 1920(?).
He would return to Korea once again after Japan's defeat in World War II, as the American military government in control of what would become South Korea invited him as an advisor in 1947. As the chaotic conditions in Korea combined with his advanced age, made it difficult for him to achieve much, he shortly returned to the United States where he died in 1951.
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