Andrew Scull

This hugely ambitious volume, worldwide in scope and ranging from antiquity to the present, examines the human encounter with Unreason in all its manifestations, the challenges it poses to society and our responses to it. In twelve chapters organized chronologically from the Bible to Freud, from exorcism to mesmerism, from Bedlam to Victorian asylums, from the theory of humours to modern pharmacology, Andrew Scull writes compellingly about madness, its meanings, its consequences and our various attempts to understand and treat it.

A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine

Madness in Civilization

Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness

Desperate Remedies

"Andrew Scull examines the social, historical, and culturally variable response to madness over the centuries, providing a provocative and entertaining examination of mental illness over more than two millennia."--P. [2] of cover.

Madness: A Very Short Introduction

A shocking story of medical brutality perfomed in the name of psychiatric medicine.

A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine

Madhouse

Written by one of the world’s most distinguished historians of psychiatry, Psychiatry and Its Discontents provides a wide-ranging and critical perspective on the profession that dominates the treatment of mental illness. Andrew Scull traces the rise of the field, the midcentury hegemony of psychoanalytic methods, and the paradigm’s decline with the ascendance of biological and pharmaceutical approaches to mental illness. The book’s historical sweep is broad, ranging from the age of the asylum to the rise of psychopharmacology and the dubious triumphs of “community care.” The essays in Psychiatry and Its Discontents provide a vivid and compelling portrait of the recurring crises of legitimacy experienced by “mad-doctors,” as psychiatrists were once called, and illustrates the impact of psychiatry’s ideas and interventions on the lives of those afflicted with mental illness.

Psychiatry and Its Discontents

The story of hysteria is a curious one, for it persists as an illness for centuries before disappearing. Andrew Scull gives a fascinating account of this socially constructed disease that came to be strongly associated with women, showing the shifts in social, cultural, and medical perceptions through history.

The Disturbing History

Hysteria

Patrick Allegaert

Bart Marius

Richly illustrated book accompanying an exhibition that tells the story of fools, idiots and madmen, whilst stressing the importance of mental wellbeing in an increasingly complex society The exhibition runs from 12 October 2019 to 31 December 2020, Museum Dr. Guislain, Ghent Madness deranges, throws us off balance, and makes us lose our footing. Yet some writers claim that madness is an enlargement of normality. But how can that which we cannot control belong to 'normality'? And what is normality? For more than 30 years, the permanent display on psychiatry has been the very heart of the Museum Dr. Guislain in Ghent. The history of psychiatry is the inspiration for new thematic exhibitions every year, in which the museum seeks to dislodge entrenched views and deep-rooted stigmas and reframe them in the context of today. In October 2019, this permanent display received a make-over and has been presented under the title 'Unhinged', in which the Museum Dr. Guislain offers a fresh look at its own history as a museum. The richly illustrated publication explores the boundaries of the traditional and goes in search of the sane in the insane. It provides an overview of psychiatry on the basis of five contemporary themes that enter into dialogue with each other: 'power and powerlessness', 'body and mind', 'architecture', 'classification' and 'imagination'. Historical documents are also put side by side with contemporary art, creating a dynamic interpretation. This new approach reflects today's 'crazy' society, in which, happily, increasing attention is being paid to psychological vulnerability, but in which mental health care is also facing new challenges more than ever.

On Jitterbugs, Melancholics and Mad-Doctors

Unhinged

Jonathan Andrews

As visiting physician to Bethlem Hospital, the archetypal "Bedlam" and Britain's first and (for hundreds of years) only public institution for the insane, Dr. John Monro (1715–1791) was a celebrity in his own day. Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull call him a "connoisseur of insanity, this high priest of the trade in lunacy." Although the basics of his life and career are well known, this study is the first to explore in depth Monro's colorful and contentious milieu. Mad-doctoring grew into a recognized, if not entirely respectable, profession during the eighteenth century, and besides being affiliated with public hospitals, Monro and other mad-doctors became entrepreneurs and owners of private madhouses and were consulted by the rich and famous. Monro's close social connections with members of the aristocracy and gentry, as well as with medical professionals, politicians, and divines, guaranteed him a significant place in the social, political, cultural, and intellectual worlds of his time. Andrews and Scull draw on an astonishing array of visual materials and verbal sources that include the diaries, family papers, and correspondence of some of England's wealthiest and best-connected citizens. The book is also distinctive in the coverage it affords to individual case histories of Monro's patients, including such prominent contemporary figures as the Earls Ferrers and Orford, the religious "enthusiast" Alexander Cruden, and the "mad" King George III, as well as his crazy would-be assassin, Margaret Nicholson. What the authors make clear is that Monro, a serious physician neither reactionary nor enlightened in his methods, was the outright epitome of the mad-trade as it existed then, esteemed in some quarters and ridiculed in others. The fifty illustrations, expertly annotated and integrated with the text, will be a revelation to many readers.

John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England

Undertaker of the Mind

What Asylums Were, Are, and Ought to Be, first published in 1837, was of considerable significance in the history of lunacy reform in Britain. It contains perhaps the single most influential portrait by a medical author of the horrors of the traditional madhouse system. Its powerful and ideologically resonant description of the contrasting virtues of the reformed asylum, a hive of therapeutic activity under the benevolent but autocratic guidance and control of its medical superintendent, provided within a brief compass a strikingly attractive alternative vision of an apparently attainable utopia. Browne’s book thus provided important impetus to the efforts then under way to make the provision of county asylums compulsory, and towards the institution of a national system of asylum inspection and supervision. This edition, originally published in 1991 as part of the Tavistock Classics in the History of Psychiatry series, contains a lengthy introductory essay by Andrew Scull. Scull discusses the social context within which What Asylums Were, Are, and Ought to Be came to be written, examines the impact of the book on the progress of lunacy reform, and places its author’s career in the larger framework of the development of Victorian psychiatry as an organised profession. Through an examination of Browne’s tenure as superintendent of the Crichton Royal Asylum in Dumfries, Scull compares the theory and practice of asylum care in the moral treatment era, revealing the remorseless processes through which such philanthropic foundations degenerated into more or less well-tended cemeteries for the still-breathing – institutions almost startlingly remote from Browne’s earlier visions of what they ought to be.

W.A.F. Browne and the Mid-Nineteenth Century Consolidation of Psychiatry

The Asylum as Utopia (Psychology Revivals)

Neste Loucura na civilização: uma história cultural da insanidade, o sociólogo britânico Andrew Scull condensa mais de quatro décadas de pesquisas sobre a história da loucura, da medicina e da psiquiatria. Percorrendo diversos pontos do globo, com destaque para a América do Norte e a Europa, o autor vai do mundo antigo à contemporaneidade, revelando como diferentes culturas interpretaram e lidaram com a irracionalidade humana no decorrer dos séculos. O surgimento e a expansão dos hospícios, os tratamentos não convencionais da medicina, o papel da religiosidade, a perseguição às mulheres e aos marginalizados, a influência da loucura nas artes, o advento da psiquiatria e a revolução dos psicofármacos são alguns dos temas abordados no livro, cujo texto envolvente é ainda pontuado por uma admirável seleção de imagens.

Uma história cultural da insanidade

Loucura na civilização

Steven Lukes

The law was central to Durkheim's sociological theory and to his efforts to establish sociology as a distinctive discipline. This revised and updated second edition of Durkheim and the Law brings together key texts which demonstrate the development of Durkheim's thinking on the sociology of law, several of them newly translated here. The editors, both world-renowned Durkheim scholars, provide a comprehensive analysis of the intellectual significance and distinctiveness of Durkheim's work on the subject. They show how his ideas evolved over time; how they contributed to the development of a distinctively Durkheimian vision of a science of society; and they provide a comprehensive assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of his theorizing about law, as well as its continuing relevance for contemporary sociology. Enriched with a new introduction and useful learning features, this book remains a major reference for students of socio-legal theory.

Durkheim and the Law

A sweeping history of American psychiatry—from prisons to hospitals to the lab to the analyst’s couch—by the award-winning author of Madness in Civilization. For more than two hundred years, disturbances of the mind—the sorts of things that were once called “madness”—have been studied and treated by the medical profession. Mental illness, some insist, is a disease like any other, whose origins can be identified and from which one can be cured. But is this true? In this masterful account of America’s quest to understand and treat everything from anxiety to psychosis, one of the most provocative thinkers writing about psychiatry today sheds light on its tumultuous past. Desperate Remedies brings together a galaxy of mind doctors working in and out of institutional settings: psychologists and psychoanalysts, neuroscientists, and cognitive behavioral therapists, social reformers and advocates of mental hygiene, as well as patients and their families desperate for relief. Andrew Scull begins with the birth of the asylum in the reformist zeal of the 1830s and carries us through to the latest drug trials and genetic studies. He carefully reconstructs the rise and fall of state-run mental hospitals to explain why so many of the mentally ill are now on the street and why so many of those whose bodies were experimented on were women. In his compelling closing chapters, he reveals how drug companies expanded their reach to treat a growing catalog of ills, leading to an epidemic of over-prescribing while deliberately concealing debilitating side effects. Carefully researched and compulsively readable, Desperate Remedies is a definitive account of America’s long battle with mental illness that challenges us to rethink our deepest assumptions about who we are and how we think and feel.

'A riveting chronicle of faulty science, false promises, arrogance, greed, and shocking disregard for the wellbeing of patients suffering from mental disorders. An eloquent, meticulously documented, clear-eyed call for change' Dirk Wittenborn In this masterful work, Andrew Scull, one of the most provocative thinkers writing about psychiatry, sheds light on its troubled history For more than two hundred years, disturbances of reason, cognition and emotion - the sort of things that were once called 'madness' - have been described and treated by the medical profession. Mental illness, it is said, is an illness like any other - a disorder that can treated by doctors, whose suffering can be eased, and from which patients can return. And yet serious mental illness remains a profound mystery that is in some ways no closer to being solved than it was at the start of the twentieth century. In this clear-sighted and provocative exploration of psychiatry, acclaimed sociologist Andrew Scull traces the history of its attempts to understand and mitigate mental illness: from the age of the asylum and surgical and chemical interventions, through the rise and fall of Freud and the talking cure, and on to our own time of drug companies and antidepressants. Through it all, Scull argues, the often vain and rash attempts to come to terms with the enigma of mental disorder have frequently resulted in dire consequences for the patient. Deeply researched and lucidly conveyed, Desperate Remedies masterfully illustrates the assumptions and theory behind the therapy, providing a definitive new account of psychiatry's and society's battle with mental illness.

Psychiatry and the Mysteries of Mental Illness

Cultural Sociology of Mental Illness: An A to Z Guide looks at recent reports that suggest an astonishing rise in mental illness and considers such questions as: Are there truly more mentally ill people now or are there just more people being diagnosed and treated? What are the roles of economics and the pharmacological industry in this controversy? At the core of what is going on with mental illness in America and around the world, the editors suggest, is cultural sociology: How differing cultures treat mental illness and, in turn, how mental health patients are affected by the culture. In this illuminating multidisciplinary reference, expert scholars explore the culture of mental illness from the non-clinical perspectives of sociology, history, psychology, epidemiology, economics, public health policy, and finally, the mental health patients themselves. Key themes include Cultural Comparisons of Mental Health Disorders; Cultural Sociology of Mental Illness Around the World; Economics; Epidemiology; Mental Health Practitioners; Non-Drug Treatments; Patient, the Psychiatry, and Psychology; Psychiatry and Space; Psychopharmacology; Public Policy; Social History; and Sociology. Key Features This two-volume A-Z work, available in both print and electronic formats, includes close to 400 articles by renowned experts in their respective fields. An Introduction, a thematic Reader’s Guide, a Glossary, and a Resource Guide to Key Books, Journals, and Associations and their web sites enhance this invaluable reference. A chronology places the cultural sociology of mental illness in historical context. 150 photos bring concepts to life. The range and scope of this Encyclopedia is vivid testimony to the intellectual vitality of the field and will make a useful contribution to the next generation of sociological research on the cultural sociology of mental illness.

An A-to-Z Guide

Cultural Sociology of Mental Illness

Andrew Scull studies the evolution of the treatment of lunacy in England, tracing transformations in social practices & beliefs, the development of institutional management of the mad, & exposing the contrasts between the expectations of asylum founders & the harsh realities of institutional life. Originally published: 1993.

Madness and Society in Britain, 1700-1900

The Most Solitary of Afflictions

This compelling book brings together many of the major papers published by Andrew Scull in the history of psychiatry over the past decade and a half. Examining some of the major substantive debates in the field from the eighteenth century to the present, the historiographic essays provide a critical perspective on such major figures as Michel Foucault, Roy Porter and Edward Shorter. Chapters on psychiatric therapeutics and on the shifting social responses to madness over a period of almost three centuries add to a comprehensive assessment of Anglo-American confrontations with madness in this period, and make the book invaluable for those concerned to understand the psychiatric enterprise. The Insanity of Place/The Place of Insanity will be of interest to students and professionals of the history of medicine and of psychiatry, as well as sociologists concerned with deviance and social control, the sociology of mental illness and the sociology of the professions.

Essays on the History of Psychiatry

The Insanity of Place / The Place of Insanity

Social Order/Mental Disorder represents a provocative and exciting exploration of social response to madness in England and the United States from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Scull, who is well-known for his previous work in this area, examines a range of issues, including the changing social meanings of madness, the emergence and consolidation of the psychiatric profession, the often troubled relationship between psychiatry and the law, the linkages between sex and madness, and the constitution, character, and collapse of the asylum as our standard response to the problems posed by mental disorder. This book is emphatically not part of the venerable tradition of hagiography that has celebrated psychiatric history as a long struggle in which the steady application of rational-scientific principles has produced irregular but unmistakable evidence of progress toward humane treatments for the mentally ill. In fact, Scull contends that traditional mental hospitals, for much of their existence, resembled cemeteries for the still breathing, medical hubris having at times served to license dangerous, mutilating, even life-threatening experiments on the dead souls confined therein. He argues that only the sociologically blind would deny that psychiatrists are deeply involved in the definition and identification of what constitutes madness in our world – hence, claims that mental illness is a purely naturalistic category, somehow devoid of contamination by the social, are taken to be patently absurd. Scull points out, however, that the commitment to examine psychiatry and its ministrations with a critical eye by no means entails the romantic idea that the problems it deals with are purely the invention of the professional mind, or the Manichean notion that all psychiatric interventions are malevolent and ill-conceived. It is the task of unromantic criticism that is attempted in this book.

Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective

Social Order/Mental Disorder

The Victorian Age saw the transformation of the madhouse into the asylum into the mental hospital; of the mad-doctor into the alienist into the psychiatrist; and of the madman (and madwoman) into the mental patient. In Andrew Scull's edited collection Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen, contributors' essays offer a historical analysis of the issues that continue to plague the psychiatric profession today. Topics covered include the debate over the effectiveness of institutional or community treatment, the boundary between insanity and criminal responsibility, the implementation of commitment laws, and the differences in defining and treating mental illness based on the gender of the patient.

The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era

Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen

Charlotte MacKenzie

Nicholas Hervey

Through an examination of the fascinating lives and careers of a series of nineteenth-century "mad-doctors," Masters of Bedlam provides a unique perspective on the creation of the modern profession of psychiatry, taking us from the secret and shady practices of the trade in lunacy, through the utopian expectations that were aroused by the lunacy reform movement, to the dismal realities of the barracks-asylums--those Victorian museums of madness within which most nineteenth-century alienists found themselves compelled to practice. Across a century that spans the period from an unreformed Bedlam to the construction of a post-Darwinian bio-psychiatry centered on the new Maudsley Hospital, from a therapeutics of bleeding, purging, and close confinement through the era of moral treatment and nonrestraint to a fin-de-siécle degenerationism and despair, men claiming expertise in the treatment of mental disorder sought to construct a collective identity as trustworthy and scientifically qualified professionals. This fascinating series of biographies answers the question: How successful were they in creating such a new identity?. Drawing on an extensive array of sources, the authors vividly re-create the often colorful and always eventful lives of these seven "masters of bedlam." Sensitive to the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of each man's personal biography, the authors replace hagiographical ac-counts of the great men who founded modern psychiatry with fully rounded portraits of their struggles and successes, their achievements and limitations. In the process Masters of Bedlam provides an extremely subtle and nuanced portrait of the efforts of successive generations of alienists to carve out a popular and scientific respect for their specialty, and reminds us repeatedly of the complexities of nineteenth-century developments in the field of psychiatry. Originally published in 1996. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Transformation of the Mad-Doctoring Trade

Masters of Bedlam

Written by one of the world's most distinguished historians of psychiatry, Psychiatry and Its Discontents provides a wide-ranging and critical perspective on the profession that dominates the treatment of mental illness. Andrew Scull traces the rise of the field, the midcentury hegemony of psychoanalytic methods, and the paradigm's decline with the ascendance of biological and pharmaceutical approaches to mental illness. The book's historical sweep is broad, ranging from the age of the asylum to the rise of psychopharmacology and the dubious triumphs of "community care." The essays in Psychiatry and Its Discontents provide a vivid and compelling portrait of the recurring crises of legitimacy experienced by "mad-doctors," as psychiatrists were once called, and illustrates the impact of psychiatry's ideas and interventions on the lives of those afflicted with mental illness.

Andrew Scull

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