“The position of court physician [in the mid-1880s] was no sinecure,” especially if you were a foreigner, declared Horace N. Allen in one of his many publications of life in Korea.
History often confines itself to narrating only the events surrounding key protagonists and antagonists, their exploits and faults and their eventual fates. But in my opinion, it is often the people surrounding these key figures who are the most interesting - the ways in which they interact with our heroes and villains, the subtle (and, sometimes, not so subtle) influence they exert and their own deeds that are sometimes misappropriated by or misattributed to the powerful political player.