Andrew Scull > Quotes

“As its lists of diagnoses and ‘diseases’ proliferate, the frantic efforts to distinguish ever-larger numbers of types and sub-types of mental disorder come to seem like an elaborately disguised game of make-believe.”
― Andrew Scull, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine

“It has become fashionable in some scholarly circles to suggest that perhaps lobotomy was not so bad after all; that its proponents ought to be cut some slack, given the grim clinical realities that they confronted in the 1930s and 1940s; that after all, many of them acted with the best of intentions and within the limitations of the science of the times. For others, the lobotomy era is symbolic of how society’s efforts to grapple with the nightmare that is severe mental illness seems at times to license remedies that are worse than the disease, interventions that themselves almost appear to constitute a form of madness. As is doubtless apparent, my sympathies, at least, belong with the latter camp, those who seek to obey the ancient Hippocratic command: ‘First do no harm.’ And whatever one’s ultimate judgement about the merits of Freud’s system, it bears mentioning that much of the professional opposition that persisted even in lobotomy’s heyday came from the ranks of the psychoanalysts. For those who saw madness as rooted in meaning, taking an ice-pick to the frontal lobes was a category mistake, as well as an act of barbarism.”
― Andrew Scull, Madness: A Very Short Introduction

“Hippocratic text read, ‘the womb is the origin of all diseases’.”
― Andrew Scull, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine

“Only later, when the ambiguities and implied contempt – the slur embodied in that term – came to seem too much, did the proto-profession embrace without a clear preference a whole array of alternatives: ‘asylum superintendent’, ‘medical psychologist’ or (in a nod to the French) ‘alienist’.”
― Andrew Scull, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine

“Foucault’s was a seductive image, one that helped to make him famous and to attract legions of disciples. But for all that, it remains a late 20th-century ideological construct, one with little or no contemporary relevance or resonance in the societies it purports to describe.”
― Andrew Scull, Madness: A Very Short Introduction

“It reminds insistently of how tenuous our own hold on reality may sometimes be. It challenges our sense of the very limits of what it is to be human.”
― Andrew Scull, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine

“Saul, the first king of the Israelites, and Nebuchadnezzar, the mighty king of Babylon, both offended Yahweh, and both received a terrible punishment for their lèse-majesté. They were made mad.”
― Andrew Scull, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine