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The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China By Emily Baum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. ix + 267 pp. $112.50 (cloth); $37.50 (paper).

Emily Baum’s book, the very first monograph on madness and psychiatry in Republican China, recounts both the history of China’s “psychiatric modernity” and the changing ways in which a variety of people understood and handled madness—and eventually “mental illness”—from roughly 1900 to 1937. The book focuses almost entirely on Beijing, which despite increased poverty remained politically autonomous until the Japanese invasion. Thanks to this retained sovereignty, Baum’s main archives “are composed in an entirely Chinese (rather than Western) voice” (13). Chinese sources include a trove of police records kept at the Beijing Municipal Archives, newspapers and magazines from North China, and documents from the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Baum also exploits English-language documents like missionary publications, the corpus of the Kerr Refuge for the Insane in Guangzhou, and smaller hoards such as those of the Rockefeller Archive Center and the Bryn Mawr College Archives. Baum defines madness as “an intricate web conjoining physiological processes, social structures, cultural norms, and personal subjectivities” (10), but also calls it “a condition,” “an illness,” or “a very real affliction,” and sometimes uses it interchangeably with “mental illness” or “mental distress,” so that the distinction between innocuous labels, translations, and categories of analysis is occasionally blurred. Such slippages occur in even the best histories of madness. Seven chapters of balanced length are arranged both chronologically and thematically. The narrative provides clear guidance through a complex history during which popular understandings of madness (and the institutions designed to manage it) changed quickly and dramatically. Chapter 1 (“Contracting the ‘Mad Illness’”) surveys how Chinese people conceived of and treated madness in the second half of the nineteenth century. Baum supplements the thin secondary literature on this subject with missionary accounts, case records from Chinese physicians, and Chinese newspapers and magazines. Madness was not handled by any specialized institution or exclusive experts and was not considered a uniform object. This multiform disorder “exhibited a variety of psychosomatic symptoms” (18) that could be attributed to a wide array of “biological, emotional, moral ... cosmological” (23), and supernatural causes, and was treated medicinally, ritually, or socially depending on the identified cause. People identified as mad were kept and treated at home. This instructive survey supersedes