Lāi-goā-kho Khàn-hō͘-ha̍k (English: The Principles and Practice of Nursing; Chinese: 內外科看護學) is a Taiwanese-language human nursing textbook. The book was compiled by English M.D. George Gushue-Taylor and his Taiwanese assistant Tân Toā-lô (陳大鑼). It was first printed at Yokohama, Japan on Oct. 5, 1917, then published at Tainan Prefecture, Japanese Formosa on Oct. 8, same year. Moreover, it is widely regarded as a first work on the subject in Taiwanese Hokkien.
Contents and themes
This book is written in the Pe̍h-ōe-jī orthography and includes 40 chapters, 675 pages and 503 figures. Generally, it is a medical textbook that contains a fully comprehensive account of the anatomical, physiological, and human body’s knowledge available at the time of publication.
Given the motif of the book in the first chapter, it is shown as follows.
Tē 1 Chiuⁿ “Seng-khu Phó͘-thong ê Kò͘-chō”
This translates to: (Chapter 1: ″The structure of human body″: Anatomy, as is a part of science, and its object is studying the structure of human body…)
This book served as a link between past and future in Taiwan medical history and promoted the development of earlier Taiwan medicine localization.