ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Translating Madness: The John G. Kerr Refuge for the Insane and the Co-production of Psychiatric Knowledge in Late Qing Canton

• In Event: Contested Theories of Body and Mind

English Abstract

This paper examines the John G. Kerr Refuge for the Insane (Guangzhou, 1898) as a crucible for the formation of modern psychiatric knowledge in China. Moving beyond a narrative of simple Western transplantation, it argues that psychiatric "facts" in this context were dynamically co-produced through multilingual, multi-agent encounters within the asylum's walls. By analyzing hospital reports, casebooks, and missionary correspondence, the study traces how clinicians struggled to translate Chinese idioms of distress into Western diagnostic categories, and how institutional routines for social control and moral management simultaneously shaped and silenced patient voices. The paper investigates three interconnected arenas of negotiation: first, how the Refuge's hybrid identity—as a humanitarian mission, a tool of colonial modernity, and a local charitable institution—was forged amidst the social politics of colonial-port Canton; second, how treatment practices, from custodial care to somatic interventions, were negotiated among missionary doctors, Chinese assistants, and patients' families; and third, how the very definition of madness was transformed from a matter of moral failing or supernatural influence into a object of medicalized institutional management. Ultimately, by situating the asylum within transnational medical networks and local worlds, this research recovers the marginalized experiences of the insane while demonstrating psychiatry as a contested arena of epistemic negotiation. It contributes to a global history of science by revealing how medical modernity in China was not merely imported, but actively assembled and translated at the intersection of competing knowledge systems and power relations.

Author

• Yanan Liu, Sun Yat-sen University