I am a historian of law and medicine in late imperial China. With a focus on the legitimacy of knowledge, my research demonstrates how medical knowledge and practice were applied to clarify uncertain questions of illness—particularly madness—within judicial settings. My dissertation, “Legal Justice, Medical Authority, and Madness in Qing China,” argues that the medico-legal interface, revolving around an emerging legal category of madness, was central to adjudicating madness from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Drawing on more than 2,000 criminal cases in the First Historical Archives of China, alongside medical texts, government reports, administrative handbooks, and newspapers, I analyze how medico-legal interactions—before and after the arrival of Western medicine and psychiatry—shaped the adjudication of murder cases where defendants claimed innocence on grounds of madness.

My book manuscript examines how Qing officials determined culpability and intent in cases of madness, an elusive and unstable condition that defied classification. It argues that during the eighteenth century, the Qing state selectively recognized Chinese medical reasoning as legally actionable knowledge in madness investigation. This gave rise to a distinctive medico-legal framework that was later reshaped in the early nineteenth century and ultimately overwritten during the legal reforms of the early twentieth century. This framework emerged through a contingent process shaped by bureaucratic prudence, evidentiary norms, and the adjudicative framework of qing-li-fa—public sentiment, moral reasoning, and statutory law. Within this context, madness was understood as a chronic yet treatable condition caused by emotional disturbance and bodily dysfunction.

By reconstructing how eighteenth-century state officials integrated medicine into the governance of madness, my research demonstrates that the criminal justice was shaped as much from the bottom up as from the center down. Local practitioners’ practical experiences played an active role in legal reasoning, reshaping the practice of justice and reframing both the history of Chinese medicine and the history of criminal law. Madness adjudication thus reveals a medically informed institutional transformation that unfolded well before the introduction of Western psychiatry into China. Extending into the early twentieth century, the shift from “madness” to “mental illness” in the new criminal code of Qing China exposes how the imperial state improvised a new legal category to preserve authority amid epistemic uncertainty and redefined what counted as legitimate knowledge. This trajectory highlights a distinctive form of Chinese legal modernity and challenges Euro-American centered theories of medicine and politics.

My dissertation forms part of a broad research agenda on medico-legal interactions and medical pluralism, addressing scholarly audiences in Chinese history, Japanese history and medical humanities, while also contributing to broader conversations in global and comparative histories of medicine. My first article, published in Medical Humanities, examines how the biomedicalization of aging in postwar Japan pathologized old age, while also showing the older adults’ active role in shaping their healthcare experiences. A second article, currently undergoing revision and scheduled for resubmission to Late Imperial China in October 2025, turns to eighteenth-century murder cases in which defendants asserted their innocence due to mental derangement, demonstrating the crucial role of medical assessments in Qing capital review procedures. I am also contributing an invited book chapter on forensic medicine for the Cambridge History of Medicine, vol.3 (1450-1700), under contract with Cambridge University Press, which demonstrates the recognition of my research within global histories of medicine.

The First Historical Archives of China

My primary research site, where I consulted over 2,000 criminal case reports in Qing China (1644-1912).