Madness in Civilization

Andrew Scull, a sociologist who studies the history of psychiatry, follows how people have understood and treated madness from antiquity to the present. Twelve chapters run in chronological order, moving from the Bible to Freud, from the theory of humours to modern drugs, from exorcism to mesmerism and from Bedlam to the asylums of the Victorian era. Scull notes that mental disturbance is now mostly seen through medicine, while people have also explained it through religion and the supernatural, or through psychological and social accounts. He examines how madness shows itself, what it has meant, what it has led to and how it has been treated. It first appeared from Thames & Hudson in London in 2015.

Lex Fridman named it, alongside Desperate Remedies, among the many books by Scull that he highly recommends.