Mad acts, mad speech, and mad people in late imperial Chinese law and medicine

This dissertation attempts to explain how Chinese officials, physicians, and ordinary families construed and handled mad speech, crazy behavior, and insane people from roughly 1000 CE to the end of the Qing dynasty (1644--1911). I treat "madness" not as an entity, but as an ascribed characteristic of people, acts, and words.;Part 1 analyzes how physicians from Song (960--1279) to Qing explained and treated kuang or diankuang ("mania," "insanity"), a chiefly behavioral illness. Far from splitting mind from body, most doctors assumed that psycho-behavioral pathology supervened upon organic imbalances; they thus treated mad patients with drugs designed to correct these imbalances. As I trace how doctors came to attribute insanity to the action of inner Fire and mucus (instead of invasion by Wind or demons), I explore several key issues in Chinese medical history: what doctrinal innovations Jin-Yuan physicians (1115--1368) proposed, why the most sophisticated Ming (1368--1644) medical writers were syncretists (zhezhong ), why the "Danxi corpus"----a body of works attributed to Zhu Zhenheng (1282--1358)----dominated Ming medical thinking, and how profoundly intertextual the Chinese medical tradition was. I also study how doctors interpreted possession symptoms and postpartum insanity.;Part 2 examines Qing judicial and popular practices surrounding "madness." Legal fengbing ("madness illness") and medical kuang functioned differently because they emerged from (and were deployed within) fields of practices whose categories and concerns differed. The way legal officials handled mad acts was shaped by specific institutional concerns and procedures. In the 1660s, the new crime "killing because of madness" likened mad homicides to accidental killings. Because this crime was not punished physically, legislators soon ordered that mad people be preventively confined. Although the script by which Qing law understood mad killings hardly changed, mad homicides were sentenced increasingly severely starting in the 1750s, especially when victims were senior relatives. Yet few mad killers were executed. By contrast, ostensibly mad men whose written fantasies harnessed imperial symbols were often sentenced to death for subversion. This fear that "mad words" could threaten the symbolic fabric of the eighteenth-century Qing state sheds new light on the old topic of "literary trials" (wenziyu).