ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Disease, Space, and Text: The Making of Stimulant Culture in the Modern City

• In Event: New Insights in the History of Chinese Science 2

English Abstract

In modern China, stimulants occupied an ambivalent position. They were indispensable in daily life, while also being increasingly criticized, regulated, and prohibited. The study traces how a unique “stimulant culture” was constructed through disease, space, and text. It begins with the Chinese medical concept of shen (vitality/spirit). With the introduction of Western medicine, shen became a key site for reinterpreting Chinese and Western understandings of vitality, nerves, and stimulation.
This chapter first discussed neurasthenia, a diagnosis that became a language for expressing exhaustion and the pressures of modern life. Drawing on drug advertisements, public discussions, and clinical practices, it reveals a paradoxical cycle in which stimulants were both a cause of neurasthenia and its remedy. It further focuses on “sexual neurasthenia,” from which we can observe how anxieties surrounding sex, bodily weakness, and modern civilization created fertile ground for the expansion of stimulant culture. The chapter then shifts to urban spaces, where stimulants served as part of modern sociability, class identity, and intellectual exchange. Finally, it explores the texts and discourse surrounding stimulants, how they came to be cultural metaphors for excitement, productivity, and national strength, while also being moralized and stigmatized.
The stimulant culture in modern China emerged from cross-cultural encounters of Chinese, Western, and Japanese knowledge and practices. It was shaped through continuous processes of translation, negotiation, commercialization, and reinterpretation. From the story of stimulants, we can see how modern Chinese society reimagined vitality, exhaustion, desire, and stimulation in the project of modernization.

Author

• Yuqi Jin, University of Auckland