Andrew T. Scull

"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 drawn from a great variety of social strata - offers an extraordinary window into the subterranean world of the mad-trade in eighteenth-century London. Monro was the physician to Bethlem Hospital and the second in a dynasty of Dr. Monros who monopolized that office for over a century. His hospital, the oldest and most famous/infamous psychiatric establishment in the English-speaking world, was the mystical, mythical Bedlam of our collective imaginings. But Monro also had an extensive private practice ministering to the mad and was the proprietor of several private metropolitan madhouses. His case book testifies to the scope and prosperity of Monro's "trade in lunacy," and Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull brilliantly exploit the opportunity it affords to look inside the mad-business." "The volume concludes with a complete edition of the case book itself, transcribed in full with editorial annotations by the authors. Apparently the only such document to survive from eighteenth-century England, the case book covers no more than a year of Monro's practice, yet it provides rare and often intimate details on a hundred of his private patients. As Andrews and Scull show, Monro's notes, when read with care and interpreted within a broader historical context, document an unparalelled perspective on the relatively fluid, reciprocal, and negotiable relations that existed between the mad-doctor and his patients, their families, and other practitioners. The fragmented stories reveal a poignant underworld of human psychological distress, and Andrews and Scull place these "cases" in a real world where John Monro and other successful doctors were practicing (and inventing) the diagnosis and treatment of madness."--BOOK JACKET.

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.

"Madhouse reveals a long-suppressed medical scandal, shocking in its brutality and sobering in its implications. It shows how a leading American psychiatrist of the early twentieth century came to believe that mental illnesses were the product of chronic infections that poisoned the brain. Convinced that he had uncovered the single source of psychosis, Henry Cotton, superintendent of the Trenton State Hospital, New Jersey, launched a ruthless campaign to "eliminate the perils of pus infection." Teeth were pulled, tonsils excised, stomachs, spleens, colons, and uteruses were all sacrificed in the assault on "focal sepsis."" "Many patients did not survive Cotton's surgeries; thousands more were left mangled and maimed. Cotton's work was controversial, yet none of his colleagues questioned his experimental practices. Subsequent historians and psychiatrists, too, have ignored the events that cast doubt on their favourite narratives of scientific and humanitarian progress." "Andrew Scull exposes the full, frightening story of madness among the mad-doctors. Drawing on a wealth of documents and interviews, he reconstructs a nightmarish, cautionary chapter in modern psychiatry, when professionals failed to police themselves."--Jacket.

"A sweeping history of American psychiatry-from jails 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: physicians and psychoanalysts, psychologists, neuroscientists, and 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, showing how the mentally ill went from prisons to asylums back to prisons, and explaining why so many of the mentally ill are now on the street. In his compelling closing chapters, he reveals how drug companies expanded their reach to treat a growing catalog of ills, deliberately concealing debilitating side effects. Deeply 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"--

"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 so many generations of Monros were affiliated with Bethlem that they practically seemed to serve by divine right. Their rule there may have been far from absolute, since attending physicians were in reality employees of the governors who controlled public hospitals, but in the same period John Munro and other mad-doctors became entrepreneurs and owners of private madhouses and were consulted by the rich and famous.". "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. 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 the 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. The fifty illustrations, expertly annotated and integrated with the text, will be a revelation to many readers. Not only historians but anyone interested in ideas of mental illness and practices of mad-doctoring through the years will find Undertaker of the Mind absorbing reading."--BOOK JACKET.

"From the age of six, Hornbacher knew that something was terribly wrong with her, manifesting itself in anorexia and bulimia which she documented in her bestselling memoir 'Wasted'. But it was only 18 years later that she learned the true underlying reason for her distress: bipolar disorder."--Jacket.

"This book brings together many of the major papers published by Andrew Scull in the history of psychiatry over the past decade and a half. Its historiographic essays provide a critical perspective on such major figures as Michel Foucault, Roy Porter, and Edward Shorter, and subsequent chapters examine some of the major substantive debates in the field from the eighteenth century to the present." "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."--BOOK JACKET.