This chapter examines the origins and legacy of sexology – the scientific study of sexuality – in the modern world. First consolidated into a coherent programme in the late nineteenth century, sexology has its roots in the re-organization of knowledge about nature in the frameworks of taxonomy, evolutionism, and race. A pervasive preoccupation with heredity gave rise to powerful eugenics movements around the world. The interest in controlling variability and unlocking the secrets of the soul generated parallel developments in biomedicine, especially psychoanalysis and endocrinology. Sex experts worldwide converged in diagnosing cultural signs of homosexuality for the purpose of national modernization. As the centre of gravity in sexual science began to shift from Europe to North America, researchers gave growing support to the sex/gender distinction and redefined the meanings of normality. In the waning days of hereditarian theories, the rise of cultural anthropology coupled with a renewed scientific investment of colonial powers to reverse hierarchical templates of sexual practices and norms emanating from the metropoles. A public health crisis (HIV/AIDS), social movements (gender and sexual minority rights), and the systematization of research protocols (bioethics) shaped a comeback of biological sexology in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

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.