The Most Solitary of Afflictions

The Most Solitary of Afflictions

Author: Andrew Scull

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1993-01-01

Total Pages: 470

ISBN-13: 9780300107548

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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.


Anatomy Of Madness Vol 1

Anatomy Of Madness Vol 1

Author: W F Bynum

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-24

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1136524924

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This is a collection of essays on the history of Psychiatry. Volume I of three, offers works around people and ideas including those of Samuel Johnson, Jon Conolly, Descartes, Freud, Darwin and Hamlet. Most of the papers in these volumes arose from a seminar series on the history of psychiatry and a one-day seminar on the same theme held at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, during the academic year 1982-83.


Routledge Library Editions: Psychiatry

Routledge Library Editions: Psychiatry

Author: Various

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-28

Total Pages: 7671

ISBN-13: 0429795955

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Psychiatry is a medical field concerned with the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of mental health conditions. Routledge Library Editions: Psychiatry (24 Volume set) brings together titles, originally published between 1958 and 1997. The set demonstrates the varied nature of mental health and how we as a society deal with it. Covering a number of areas including child and adolescent psychiatry, alternatives to psychiatry, the history of mental health and psychiatric epidemiology.


Social Order/Mental Disorder

Social Order/Mental Disorder

Author: Andrew Scull

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-09-24

Total Pages: 567

ISBN-13: 0429850360

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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.