ABSTRACT
Before the twentieth century, medicine in China traced disruptive behavior by women to biological or reproductive function, to menstrual disorders, or intense emotions such as anger and fright. Mucus accumulations (tan Ⱖ), too, could explain conditions such as confusion, bouts of madness, or sustained derangement.1 However, in the early twentieth century, a nascent neuropsychiatry in China began tracing female mental health problems to the stress of the marriage system, to women’s vulnerable status, to pathos in the home. Clinical observers began rethinking the self-injuring actions of women, such as swallowing poison or stabbing one’s body with needles. To be sure, self-harm was still classi ed as a suicide or suicide attempt. Yet analysis of self-destructive actions looked to the misery of the patrilineal household and woman’s untenable position within it. ese shi s in medical reasoning are seen in the writings of European and American doctors working in China and in the case histories of hospitals where physicians consciously resisted the approaches of foreign medicine.
