Psychiatrie et histoire chinoise

Psychiatry and Chinese History


Howard Chiang (editor)

Pickering & Chatto
Studies for the Society for the Social History of Medicine

256pp: 234x156mm: July 2014 

HB 978 1 84893 438 2: £60/$99

This landmark collection examines psychiatric medicine in China across the early modern and modern periods. Essays focus on the diagnosis, treatment and cultural implications of madness and mental illness. From emotional therapy and missionary interventions in the late imperial era to the establishment of neuropsychiatry and the psycho-boom in the twentieth century, this book explores the complex trajectory of the medicalization of the mind in shifting political contexts of Chinese history.

Introduction: Historicizing Chinese Psychiatry – Howard Chiang

Part I: Historical Precedents

1 Exorcising Dreams and Nightmares in Late Ming China – Brigid E Vance

2 Emotional Therapy and Talking Cures in Late Imperial China – Hsiu-fen Chen

3 Medicaments and Persuasion: Medical Therapies for Madness in Nineteenth-Century China – Fabien Simonis

Part II: Missionary Investments

4 Psychiatric Space and Design Antecedents: The John G Kerr Refuge for the Insane – Peter Szto

5 An Iron Cage of Civilization? Missionary Psychiatry, the Chinese Family and a Colonial Dialect of Enlightenment – Zhiying Ma

6 Tropical Neurasthenia or Oriental Nerves: White Breakdowns in China – Wen-Ji Wang

Part III: Biomedical Modernity

7 Pathologizing Marriage: Neuropsychiatry and the Escape of Women in Early Twentieth-Century China – Hugh Shapiro

8 Gone with the West Wind: The Emergence and Disappearance of Psychotherapeutic Culture in China, 1936–68 – Geoffrey Blowers and Shelley Wang Xuelai

9 A Charted Epidemic of Trauma: Case Notes at the Psychiatric Department of National Taiwan University Hospital between 1946 and 1953 – HarryYi-Jui Wu

Part IV: New Therapeutic Cultures

10 The Emergence of the Psycho-Boom in Contemporary Urban China – Hsuan-Ying Huang

Afterword: Reframing Psychiatry in China – Nancy N Chen