Most Solitary of Afflictions

Madness and Society in Britain, 1700-1900

By Andrew Scull

1993

First Published

4.00

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448

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13H40M

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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.

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Author

Andrew Scull

Author · 9 books

Andrew T. Scull (born 1947) is a British-born sociologist whose research is centered on the social history of medicine and particularly psychiatry. He is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at University of California, San Diego and recipient of the Roy Porter Medal for lifetime contributions to the history of medicine. His books include Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine and Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity. Scull was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the son of Allan Edward Scull, a civil engineer and Marjorie née Corrigan, a college teacher. He received his BA with first class honors from Balliol College, Oxford. He then studied at Princeton University, receiving his MA in Sociology in 1971 and his Ph.D. in 1974. He was a postdoc at University College London in 1976-77. Scull taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1973 until 1978 when was appointed to the sociology faculty at University of California, San Diego as an Associate Professor. He was appointed a full professor in 1982, and Distinguished Professor in 1994.