📺 K-Drama Guide · Historical · Medical · Romance
Poong, the Joseon Psychiatrist (Season 1)
조선 정신과 의사 유세풍 · 2022
✅ Completed · 12 eps
🎬 tvN · Viki · Viu · HBO Max · Apple TV+ · Prime Video
⭐ 8.0 / 10 MDL 🔞 15+
⚡ Updated · Jul 11, 2026
📋 Drama Overview
Everything worth knowing, before the opening credits.
CompletedHEALING MYSTERY PICK
Poong, the Joseon Psychiatrist (Season 1)
조선 정신과 의사 유세풍 (Joseon Jungshingwa Uisa Yoosepoong) · 2022 · South Korea
tvNVikiViuHBO MaxApple TV+Prime Video
Historical DramaMedical DramaTraumaHealingVillage Setting
Yoo Se-poong has one job at the palace — treat the king’s body — and a single conspiracy costs him that job, his father, and nearly his life. What’s left of him arrives in Gyesu Village a year later under a borrowed name, hollowed out and unable to so much as hold an acupuncture needle steady.
The widow who once talked him out of ending his life, Seo Eun-woo, is waiting there too, still grieving and still cornered by in-laws who treat her as property. Between her, the eccentric village doctor Gye Ji-han, and a clinic full of strangers with their own buried wounds, Poong starts learning that the job he lost was never really the point.
Episode Progress
12 / 12 ✅ Completed
⚡ Quick Verdict
Everything that matters, at a glance.
⭐ Worth it?Yes — a rare historical that treats emotional trauma as seriously as its central mystery
⏱️ Commitment12 episodes · ~75 min each
💛 VibeVillage clinic drama wrapped around a palace conspiracy and a slow-burn romance
📺 Skip if…You want your sageuk fast-paced and plot-forward rather than character-driven
⭐ 8.0 / 10
· MDL Score · 5,296 ratings
🎭 Cast & Characters
The clinic family that turns a disgraced physician into something closer to whole.
Kim Min-jae
Yoo Se-poong
Lead
Kim Hyang-gi
Seo Eun-woo
Lead
Kim Sang-kyung
Gye Ji-han
Supporting
Ahn Chang-hwan
Man-bok
Supporting
Jeon Guk-hyang
Granny
Supporting
Kim Su-an
Ip-bun
Supporting
🍿 Where to Watch
Stream Poong, the Joseon Psychiatrist (Season 1) on these platforms.
📺 Episode Guide
Quick recaps per episode — just enough to stay caught up.
EP 01
The Fall Of A Genius
Aug 1, 2022
A palace conspiracy costs Yoo Se-poong everything in one stroke — his position as royal acupuncturist, his father’s life, and nearly his own. Seo Eun-woo happens to be the one who catches him at his lowest point, and her insistence that he keep living plants the seed of everything the show becomes. The premiere spends its energy on collapse, trusting the healing to come later.
EP 02
A New Beginning in Gyesu Village
Aug 2, 2022
A year of drifting lands Se-poong in Gyesu Village under a new name, Poong, and a new mentor in the eccentric Gye Ji-han. Finding Eun-woo again — now widowed and cornered by cruel in-laws — gives him a reason to intervene rather than simply observe. Their second meeting turns what was a single act of rescue into something closer to mutual obligation.
EP 03
The Gumiho Murders
Aug 8, 2022
Gumiho rumors sweep through the village after a killing, and a sleepwalking girl named Yoon-hee becomes the easiest person to blame. Eun-woo’s instinct for physical evidence, more than any folklore, is what actually cracks the case open. The episode sets its template early: superstition explains nothing here that observation can’t explain better.
EP 04
Se Poong’s Painful Past
Aug 9, 2022
Royal Inspector Jo Shin-woo arrives hunting for the exact man Poong used to be, dragging the palace conspiracy back into a village that thought it had buried his past along with his old name. A servant wrongly accused of murder gives Poong and Eun-woo their next case, and clearing him means exposing a noble household’s rot. Eun-woo finally cuts ties with her in-laws for good, choosing the clinic over the family that made her a widow twice over.
EP 05
The Boy Who Couldn’t Speak
Aug 15, 2022
A young boy’s mysterious illness turns out to have a cause uglier than any disease: his own mother poisoning him slowly for sympathy and status. Poong treats the diagnosis like a puzzle with a family-shaped answer, refusing to stop at symptoms. It’s the clearest statement yet of what the clinic actually does — treat the household, not just the patient.
EP 06
The Intimacy Between Se Poong And Eun Woo
Aug 16, 2022
Training Eun-woo to practice medicine herself changes the shape of her partnership with Poong, and their next case — an abused boy hidden behind a respectable-looking family — tests both of them. Exposing the concubine behind the abuse gives the boy’s real mother the evidence she needs to finally leave. Eun-woo’s growth here matters as much as the case does.
EP 07
The Secrets Behind Haedongboncho
Aug 22, 2022
The herb Haedongboncho turns out to connect Poong’s father’s death directly to a tragedy Gye Ji-han has spent years not talking about. A grieving, suicidal patient gives the episode its emotional center, but it’s Ji-han’s unraveling backstory that gives it its weight. The clinic’s oldest wound finally gets named.
EP 08
The Plague at Sorak Village
Aug 23, 2022
A plague tears through Sorak Village, and Ji-han recognizes it instantly as an echo of something he’s lived through before. Poong walks into the isolation zone anyway, treating the infected — Eun-woo included — while the outbreak keeps circling back to the same conspiracy that ended his career. Risk and grief collapse into the same storyline here, and the show lets them.
EP 09
A Dangerous Choice
Aug 29, 2022
Shin-woo’s warning that he’s under orders to kill Poong should be the episode’s biggest threat, and Poong ignores it completely to chase down a thief who attacked Eun-woo instead. The investigation into her attack unearths an old, doomed love story that has nothing to do with the main conspiracy and everything to do with what the show actually cares about. Poong’s priorities have quietly stopped being about justice in the abstract.
EP 10
The Truth Emerges
Aug 30, 2022
A high-profile patient becomes the opening Poong needs to finally push into the royal conspiracy directly. Shin-woo, injured and in hiding, hands over the detail that implicates the Second State Councilor in the king’s death. The clinic family closes ranks around him, and the case stops being Poong’s alone.
EP 11
The Lost Hope
Sep 5, 2022
A key witness dies just as the truth comes into reach, and the loss sends Poong and Eun-woo to Hanyang to make their case to the king himself. Commander Im uses their absence to move on Gyesu Clinic, threatening the one place the show has built as safe. The episode trades momentum for dread, and earns it.
EP 12
The Judgement Day
Sep 6, 2022
Poong lays out his evidence — a poisoned needle, a ledger of bribes — and the Second State Councilor’s crimes finally have nowhere left to hide. Ji-han gets his own reckoning with the colleague who helped bury the truth alongside him years ago. Commander Im’s last grab for the clinic fails, and Poong, Eun-woo, and Ji-han end the season exactly where the show always wanted them: still together, still healing people, with room left to grow into each other.
🏁 Ending Explained
From here on, full spoilers — the ending, unpacked.
⚠️
Spoiler Warning — This section covers the full finale of Poong, the Joseon Psychiatrist (Season 1). Stop here if you haven’t finished the series.
What actually happens to the Second State Councilor Poong presents the king with hard evidence — a poisoned needle and a ledger tracking years of bribes — that ties the Second State Councilor directly to the late king’s poisoning. Faced with proof instead of rumor, the councilor’s decade of protection collapses in a single audience with the throne.
The season has spent twelve episodes showing how illness gets weaponized by people with power — a mother poisoning her own son, a concubine staging abuse, a king murdered and blamed on a physician. Naming the Second State Councilor as the source of it all closes that loop instead of treating the palace conspiracy as a separate subplot from the village cases.
What happens to Gye Ji-han Gye Ji-han finally confronts the former colleague who helped cover up the tragedy that shaped his entire life, years after the poisonous herb Haedongboncho first connected them. It’s less a confrontation than a closing of a wound Ji-han has carried since before Poong ever arrived in the village.
Ji-han’s arc has always run quieter than Poong and Eun-woo’s, mostly background color to their central case. Giving him his own reckoning in the finale, rather than folding it into the main conspiracy, is the clearest sign the show sees Gyesu Clinic as three equal healers, not one lead and two supporting acts.
Where Poong, Eun-woo, and Ji-han end up Commander Im’s last attempt to seize Gyesu Clinic fails once the king steps in on the clinic family’s behalf, securing the home they built together. Poong, Eun-woo, and Ji-han end the season back where they started — treating patients in the same village — except now with the royal conspiracy behind them and Poong and Eun-woo’s relationship openly, quietly moving toward something more.
✍️ KDramaWorlds Editor’s Take
Here’s our honest verdict, and who’s going to love it.
🩺 Village Clinic Family
🩹 Trauma As Craft
🦊 Folklore Debunked
🌱 Slow-Grown Romance
Poong wears its palace-conspiracy plot like a coat it can take off whenever it wants to actually deal with grief, and that’s the smarter choice than it sounds. Kim Min-jae plays Poong’s trauma as something that resurfaces in specific, unglamorous ways — hands that won’t hold a needle steady, a flinch at the wrong sound — rather than a single dramatic breakdown he recovers from once. Historical dramas built around a similar mix of conspiracy and slow-healing romance, like Our Blooming Youth, tend to let the mystery do most of the emotional work; Poong keeps its village cases doing that instead, which gives Kim Hyang-gi’s Eun-woo just as much room to grow as her co-lead.
Every case that walks into Gyesu Clinic doubles as its own small tragedy — a poisoned son, an abused boy, a woman driven to despair by grief nobody let her express — and the show trusts those stand-alone stories as much as its overarching mystery. The Tale of Lady Ok uses a similar structure, letting an episodic mystery format carry emotional weight a straight melodrama would usually handle directly. Here it works because Gye Ji-han’s own hidden tragedy keeps surfacing through other people’s cases before the show ever explains it outright.
What keeps Poong from tipping into cynicism, despite a body count that includes suicide attempts, poisonings, and a murdered king, is how plainly it argues that healing is a skill you can practice rather than a personality trait some people just have. By the finale, that argument has been made through three different characters instead of one, and none of them needed a supernatural excuse to change.
👍👍👍 BEST FOR 👍👍👍
🩺 Viewers who want a sageuk that treats mental health with real specificity
🌱 Fans of slow-burn romances built on trust rather than instant chemistry
🧩 Anyone who likes their historical mystery delivered case-by-case rather than all at once
⚖️ Final Verdict
What works
•Kim Min-jae’s physically specific, unglamorous take on trauma recovery
•Case-of-the-week village stories that carry as much weight as the central conspiracy
•Kim Sang-kyung’s Gye Ji-han earns a full emotional arc of his own by the finale
What to know first
•The palace conspiracy takes a back seat to village cases for long stretches
•12 episodes leaves little room for side characters like Man-bok or the Crown Prince
•A Season 2 exists (2023, 10 episodes) if the story hooks you
8.0 / 10— A sageuk that earns its title by treating healing, not conspiracy, as the real plot.
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