ABSTRACT

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.

chapter 1|13 pages

Musings about madness

chapter 2|16 pages

The insanity of place 1

chapter 3|8 pages

A failure to communicate?

On the reception of Foucault's Histoire de la folie by Anglo-American historians

chapter 4|16 pages

Madfolk and their keepers

Roy Porter and the history of psychiatry

chapter 5|9 pages

The mad-doctor and his craft

chapter 6|22 pages

Museums of madness revisited 1

chapter 7|7 pages

Blinded by biology

chapter 8|15 pages

“Nobody's fault?”

Mental health policy in modern America

chapter 10|21 pages

Psychiatric therapeutics and the historian

chapter 11|22 pages

“A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure”

Sexual surgery for psychosis in three nineteenth-century societies *

chapter 12|17 pages

Focal sepsis and psychosis

The career of Thomas Chivers Graves (1883–1964)