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Introduction: Historicizing Chinese Psychiatry
Summary
This collection of essays responds to the paucity of scholarship on the history of psychiatry and mental health in China. Looking across developments in the early modern and modern periods, the essays focus on the diagnosis, treatment and broader socio-cultural implications of madness and mental illness. This volume brings together for the first time a cohort of scholars who have worked on this topic independently but have not had the opportunity to come together as a group to formulate a synthesis of their respective expertise. The coverage is not intended to be exhaustive, but its aim is to inspire further scholarly dialogue in this underexplored area of medical history and Chinese studies. Whereas the existing literature on the history of medicine in China tends to center on the health and diseased conditions of the body, this book offers a concise integration of recent works that, together, delineate a historical trajectory of the medicalization of the mind in China's shifting cultural and political contexts.
This trajectory is neither linear nor unidirectional. As we will see, it is layered with competing meanings of key concepts such as madness, disorder, treatment and healing at different historical junctures; it has been shaped by various discourses as documented in a wide array of sources, from dream encyclopedias to case histories to missionary archives and from the patient records of neuropsychiatric wards to popular magazines to TV talk shows; above all.
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- Psychiatry and Chinese History , pp. 1 - 16Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014