Madness in Civilization 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

“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

“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

“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

“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