Andrew Scull

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.

The routine confinement of the deranged in a network of specialized and purposely built asylums is essentially a 19th-century phenomenon. Likewise, it is only from the Victorian era that a newly self-conscious and organized profession of psychiatry emerged and sought to shut the mad away in "therapeutic isolation". In this book, Andrew Scull studies the evolution of the treatment of lunacy in England and Wales, tracing what lies behind the transformations in social practices and beliefs, examining how institutional management of the mad came to replace traditional systems of family and local care, and exploring the striking contrast between the utopian expectations of the asylum's founders and the harsh realities of life in these asylums. Scull locates the roots of the new ideas about lunacy and its treatment in pervasive changes in the political, economic and social structure of British society, and in the associated shifts in the intellectual and cultural horizons of its governing classes. He explains that a widening range of eccentric behaviour was accommodated under the label of madness so that asylums became a repository for the troublesome, senile and decrepit; the resulting overcrowding of asylums, says Scull, made the original goals of treatment and cure impossible to achieve. Scull's provocative account shows that the history of our responses to madness, while far from being an unrelieved parade of horrors and ever-increasing repression, is equally far from being a stirring tale of the progress of humanity and science. This book, based on Scull's study "Museums of Madness" is an extensive reworking and enlargement of that earlier text. Drawing on his own research and that of others over the last 15 years, Scull now adds new dimensions to this work in the history of psychiatry and 19th-century British society.

This book is a lively commentary on the eighteenth-century mad-business, its practitioners, its patients (or "customers"), and its patrons, viewed through the unique lens of the private case book kept by the most famous mad-doctor in Augustan England, Dr. John Monro (1715-1791). Monro's case book, comprising the doctor's jottings on patients he saw in the course of his private practice--patients drawn from a great variety of social strata--offers an extraordinary window into the subterranean world of the mad-trade in eighteenth-century London. The volume concludes with a complete edition of the case book itself, transcribed in full with editorial annotations by the authors. In the fragmented stories Monro's case book provides, Andrews and Scull find a poignant underworld of human psychological distress, some of it strange and some quite familiar. They place these "cases" in a real world where John Monro and othersuccessful doctors were practicing, not to say inventing, the diagnosis and treatment of madness.

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.