Philanthropy and the hospitals of London: The King's Fund 1897–1990

related. While originally the concept of sin does not seem to have been indigenous in China, it spread with Buddhism and later forms of popular derivatives. Examples are found in popular literature like the Liaozhia zhiyi which also reports on cases of possession by demons, resulting in madness. A rather curious case shows the metamorphosis of a crazy peasant woman into her real and original appearance, an immortal. Moral: Before you make fun of people who appear to be crazy, consider the possibility that they might be immortals. While before the seventeenth century lunatics were not stigmatized and governments did not make attempts to quarantine them, the situation changed after the Qing had established their rule over China. The new, non-Han dynasty was naturally concerned to restore law and order after the fall of the Ming. They instituted a sophisticated supervision system which included several law enforcement methods. A mandatory registration and confinement programme was introduced by which families had to report the illness of their insane relatives to the authorities and accept the measures taken by the officials. Thus gradually an illness was turned into deviance-insanity was criminalized. Now the legal experts had to try to define madness and mete out sentences to the "offenders". In order not to change the time-honoured statutes of the Chinese law code, the Qing used the system of sub-statutes (li) as devised by Ming jurists. These were amendments which left the rule untouched but in case of doubt had precedence over the statute itself. We are in the lucky position of being able to follow the evaluation of madness in the Qing code by means of Xue Yunsheng's Duli cunyi (Commentary on Qing law) and Nakamura Shigeo's Shindai keiho kenkva (Studies on Qing law). Both works indicate changes within the code and try to determine their exact dates. Why did the Qing authorities take madness so seriously and insist on using juridical means to deal with it? One reason may have been that dissidents might easily pretend to be insane to escape punishment. And as the dynasty was not Chinese, it faced resistance. On the whole, dealing with insanity was just one mosaic stone within the Qing law and order system. Cases show, however, that Qing laws were not callous, and jurists worked to improve the laws and to prevent injustice. punishment of lunatics and negligents according to classical Chinese law'), it has …