The Invention of Madness

Reviewed by: The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China by Emily Baum Peter Szto Emily Baum. The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. ix + 267 pp. Ill. $37.50 (978-0-226-55824-0). Madness is no ordinary matter, and even less ordinary is a book on madness in China. If such a book did exist, by which standard should it be judged? Historian Emily Baum answers this query with her new book, The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China. The book traces China's first public insane asylum, the Beijing Municipal Hospital (BMH), that was established in 1908 and later merged in the 1930s with the private-run Peking Union Medical College Hospital (PUMCH). Baum's book is an erudite piece of scholarship that brings into sharp relief the role of Chinese madness for the literature on the history of medicine. The literature has focused more on the Western response to madness than the Chinese experience. Baum avoids this slant by building on Western responses, but bringing to the fore primary source materials on the invention of psychiatric care in Beijing. Her writing weaves together seemingly disparate facts into a compelling and accessible narrative. The story follows the establishment by American medical missionaries, China's first private insane asylum in Canton in 1898, and how the idea of institutionalization eventually found its way north in Beijing. Baum tackles complex undercurrents that shaped the invention of institutionalization in China, that is, the etiology of madness in traditional Chinese medical thought and popular culture, relations between public and private actors, and the notion of biomedicine in East-West perspective. Inventing madness involved describing how individuals experienced life as well as how state and society responded to these experiences. Invention also included how language ascribed meaning to madness. Baum adroitly probes how the Chinese denoted and constructed native terms for madness. This is important for the terms "madness," "psychiatry," and "biomedicine" are English constructs, imbued with Western meaning, that were imported onto China. Baum skillfully navigates the hermeneutical maze to explain Chinese native thought on madness and its accommodation of the foreign insane asylum. Terms like "biomedicine" challenged traditional Chinese cultural views of personhood long held as normative for millennia. Western versus Confucian views toward philosophical anthropology [End Page 471] raised substantive concerns: Is the seat of personhood the brain or the heart? Is the Chinese Qi a better descriptor of personhood? Is mucous the preferred organizing concept to diagnosis and treat madness? Baum provides balance between traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and Western Cartesian dualism to describe and diagnose madness. With fresh insights and scholarly rigor, she argues that Beijing of the 1930s to 1940s offered a perfect storm for the invention of madness. As a result, a reluctant Chinese modernism emerged to invent madness into psychiatric space. Baum's book sets an exemplary standard to judge the invention of madness in China. She handles Eastern and Western perspectives on madness to allow the reader to make informed judgments based on her exacting scholarship. Two areas for further inquiry are offered here in order to deepen understanding of the invention process. First, Baum relies on words to tell the story of past inventions. She uses words to conjure images of what the inventors and the invented looked like. She also includes archival photographs and posters to illustrate past ideas and practices. The images are noteworthy for their historical and visual authenticity, yet one wonders if we would know even more what invention looks like if they were given more credence as visual evidence. The photographs beg for interpretative and visual meaning, that is, were they propaganda or documentary? Who took them and for what purpose? A second area involves social welfare structures. Prior to China's accommodation of the Western insane asylum, Confucian mores dictated that the kinship-clan system assume care for insane relatives. The primary location of care was private and familial, rather than public and institutional. More explanation is needed on this structural shift from private to public. For example, PUMCH was a private faith-based invention. How

Art · Art history · Beijing · China · Institutionalisation · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · State (computer science) · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law