The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute)

Throughout most of history, in China the insane were kept within the home and treated by healers who claimed no specialized knowledge of their condition. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, psychiatric ideas and institutions began to influence longstanding beliefs about the proper treatment for the mentally ill. In __The Invention of Madness__, Emily Baum traces a genealogy of insanity from the turn of the century to the onset of war with Japan in 1937, revealing the complex and convoluted ways in which “madness” was transformed in the Chinese imagination into “mental illness.” ​ Focusing on typically marginalized historical actors, including municipal functionaries and the urban poor, __The Invention of Madness__ shifts our attention from the elite desire for modern medical care to the ways in which psychiatric discourses were implemented and redeployed in the midst of everyday life. New meanings and practices of madness, Baum argues, were not just imposed on the Beijing public but continuously invented by a range of people in ways that reflected their own needs and interests. Exhaustively researched and theoretically informed, __The Invention of Madness__ is an innovative contribution to medical history, urban studies, and the social history of twentieth-century China. This book traces a genealogy of madness in China from the turn of the twentieth century to the onset of war with Japan in 1937, revealing the complex and convoluted ways in which "madness" was transformed in the Chinese imagination into "mental illness." Throughout most of history, the insane in China were kept within the home and treated by healers who claimed no specialized knowledge of the condition. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, psychiatric ideas, vocabularies, and institutions gradually began to influence longstanding beliefs about the proper treatment for the mentally ill. Although many of these ideas were introduced to China from abroad, they were not retained wholesale; instead, psychiatric concepts were often changed, reinterpreted, and redeployed in ways that were unique to urban China at this particular historical moment. Focusing on typically marginalized historical actors, including municipal functionaries, the police, asylum workers, and the urban poor, The Invention of Madness shifts our attention from the elite desire for modern medical care to the ways in which psychiatric discourses were implemented and redeployed in the midst of everyday life. New meanings and practices of madness, the book argues, were not just imposed onto the Beijing public but continuously "invented" by a range of actors in ways that reflected their own needs and interests

Throughout most of history, in China the insane were kept within the home and treated by healers who claimed no specialized knowledge of their condition. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, psychiatric ideas and institutions began to influence longstanding beliefs about the proper treatment for the mentally ill. In The Invention of Madness, Emily Baum traces a genealogy of insanity from the turn of the century to the onset of war with Japan in 1937, revealing the complex and convoluted ways in which "madness" was transformed in the Chinese imagination into "mental illness."
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Focusing on typically marginalized historical actors, including municipal functionaries and the urban poor, The Invention of Madness shifts our attention from the elite desire for modern medical care to the ways in which psychiatric discourses were implemented and redeployed in the midst of everyday life. New meanings and practices of madness, Baum argues, were not just imposed on the Beijing public but continuously invented by a range of people in ways that reflected their own needs and interests. Exhaustively researched and theoretically informed, The Invention of Madness is an innovative contribution to medical history, urban studies, and the social history of twentieth-century China.