Within the historiography of medicine and psychiatry, there have in recent years been calls for transnational and global histories. And when it comes to the history of medicine in the twentieth century—marked by the emergence of the World Health Organization (WHO), neoliberalism, and other globalization agendas—historical accounts beyond national borders are desperately necessary. In response to these calls, Harry Yi-Jui Wu picks up the WHO and its social psychiatry project as a case for inquiry with perspectives from the “non-West” (14). Wu’s monograph Mad by the Millions provides a clear and thorough account of a global mental health agenda that recruited intellectuals from around the world. Through Wu’s investigation into the institutional history of the WHO, one can see how this collective of ideas, intellectuals, technologies, and institutions were mobilized and linked in an early ambition of an international organization. This historical account thus provides a piece to the picture of a possible genealogy of world health as a concept and a spectrum of practices, of which, from the perspectives of medical anthropologists and historians, a genuine decolonization has yet to come.
