6 ideas
In Beijing, the municipal asylum began in 1908 as a police-run institution under the New Policies reforms, not as a hospital. Its purpose was to secure public order and remove disruptive people from the streets. Psychiatric medicine arrived later and was layered onto an apparatus that already existed for social control. The medicalization of madness therefore followed the logic of policing rather than the reverse.
Families were not passive victims of state confinement. Beijing households petitioned the police to commit troublesome relatives and negotiated the terms of their release. They used the asylum as a resource for managing domestic burdens. Seen this way, the institution's power depended on popular demand as much as on state imposition.
Before the 20th century, Chinese legal and social frameworks treated madness (feng, kuang) mainly as a problem for the household to contain. Kin were responsible for restraining a mad relative and were liable for that person's acts. Madness was read through disrupted relationships and moral imbalance rather than as a discrete disease located in the brain.
Ordinary people absorbed these terms selectively and reinterpreted them through older ideas of qi, emotion and morality. The result was hybrid meanings rather than a replacement of popular understandings by scientific ones.
The 'invention' of madness did not create new sufferers. It created new categories, jurisdictions and institutions that moved an existing problem from family and moral authority into state and medical authority. To analyze such a shift, ask who holds jurisdiction over the problem, which vocabulary defines it, and which institution acts on it.
In Republican-era newspapers and advertisements, 'brain' and 'nerve' diseases were marketed alongside patent tonics that promised to strengthen weak nerves. These ads turned mental distress into a consumer condition treatable by purchase.