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

Baum, Emily

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022655824X ISBN 13: 9780226558240

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2018

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Críticas

"This book makes significant headway toward illuminating our understanding of mental illness and healing in a period that was central to the emergence of the modern Chinese state. Emily Baum has identified important sources and developed a fascinating narrative that presents the formation of a recognizably modern psychiatry in China. She ably guides the reader through a complex history wrought by overwhelming transformations felt at elite and popular levels alike."--Richard C. Keller, University of Wisconsin-Madison "Employing abundant primary sources, she offers an insightful analysis of the madness problem and its ties with China's nation building, state building, and society building. . . . Baum's book presents a persuasive history of mental health in China that is skillfully grounded in the context of China's evolution as a nation and a society."--CHOICE "The Invention of Madness offers refreshing new perspectives on a topic that has been surprisingly understudied--the diverging ways in which mental illness was understood, managed, and experienced in China in the first half of the twentieth century. With well-crafted arguments that are vigorously supported by a wide array of archival sources, this excellent book is anchored by a deep and comprehensive bibliography of scholarship on modern Chinese history, the history of Chinese medicine, and the comparative history of psychology and psychiatry, and should find an audience among historians of medicine, psychology, and psychiatry as well as experts in the history of modern China."--Carol A. Benedict, Georgetown University

Reseña del editor

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.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• ISBN 10: 022655824X
• ISBN 13: 9780226558240
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Sprache: Englisch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 280