Andrew Scull

He has written that he was born in Edinburgh; his father was an Ordnance Survey surveyor, the family moved often, spending three years in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) from the mid-1950s, and at eleven he returned to England and a grammar school.⁠[1]

He took a first-class B.A. in philosophy, politics and economics at Balliol College in 1969, an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry in 1971 and 1974, and was a postdoctoral fellow in medical history at University College London in 1976–1977.⁠[2]

He recalled that after reading Goffman, Foucault and David Rothman in Robert Scott’s seminar on deviance and social control, he chose Victorian lunacy reform as his dissertation topic.⁠[1]

He was a lecturer and assistant professor at the University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry in 1973–1978, joined UC San Diego as an associate professor in 1978 and became a distinguished professor in 1994.⁠[2]

In 1977 Prentice Hall published his Decarceration: Community Treatment and the Deviant; a revised and enlarged second edition followed in 1984.⁠[3]

In 1979 Allen Lane in London published his Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England, a 275-page book; Michael Ignatieff reviewed it in the March 1981 issue of The Historical Journal.⁠[4]

In 1996 Princeton University Press published Masters of Bedlam, written with Charlotte MacKenzie and Nicholas Hervey, whose core seven chapters each treat one of seven Victorian English and Scottish specialists in insanity; reviewer Jonathan Andrews called it a highly successful attempt to set psychiatry’s elite against a broad background.⁠[5]

His 2005 book Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine recounts how Henry Cotton of Trenton State Hospital removed patients’ teeth and organs under the theory of “focal sepsis.” After Sherwin Nuland reviewed it at length in The New York Review of Books, Scull wrote to dispute Nuland’s claim that the theory was already crumbling, pointing to Cotton’s acclaim in Britain in 1927; Nuland replied that it was Scull who had misread the past and his own book.⁠[6]

In 2009 Oxford UniversityUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry Press published his Hysteria: The Biography; reviewer Paul Lerner found that its nine chapters, though familiar to specialists and leaning on scholars such as Roy Porter and Elaine Showalter, made an excellent introduction for a general audience, written with lucidity and wit.⁠[7]

In 2015 Princeton University Press published his Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, which surveys how madness has been understood and treated since biblical times.⁠[8]

Reviewing the Thames & Hudson edition, Patrick Skene Catling called it learned, humane and wryly witty, while noting its gloomy conclusion that no one has done better than locking madness away or suppressing its symptoms.⁠[9]

Madness in Civilization has since been translated into more than fifteen languages.⁠[10]

In 2015 he received the Roy Porter Medal for lifetime contributions to the history of medicine, and in 2016 the Eric T. Carlson Award for lifetime contributions to the history of psychiatry.⁠[3][11]

In 2019 the University of California Press published his essay collection Psychiatry and Its Discontents, which traces psychiatry from the asylum era to psychopharmacology; in its opening lines he writes that he began studying Victorian lunacy reform almost half a century earlier and has been obsessed with madness ever since.⁠[12]

The publisher describes the book as portraying the recurring crises of legitimacy of “mad-doctors”; among the reviews it quotes, Nature praises its balance and scepticism about psychiatry’s failures, and the British Journal of Psychiatry says readers may not agree with all his opinions but will find the essays stimulating.⁠[13]

In 2021 he published “American psychiatry in the new millennium: a critical appraisal” in Psychological Medicine; the journal ran an invited commentary on it by Joel T. Braslow of UCLA titled “Whose crisis is it anyway?”⁠[14]

In May 2022 Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry Press published his Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness.⁠[11]

He said the book examines the whole arc of American psychiatry; he described early psychiatrists’ excessive optimism and later experiments on confined, voiceless hospital patients in search of cures, such as removing organs to eliminate supposed chronic infections and the lobotomy that emerged in the late 1930s.⁠[15]

Writer Siri Hustvedt, reviewing it for The Washington PostThe Washington PostThe Washington Post is an American daily newspaper founded in Washington in 1877, known for its role in the Pentagon Papers case and the Watergate investigation. Run by the Meyer–Graham family for eighty years from 1933, it has been owned personally by Jeff Bezos since 2013.Open the full entry, praised its lucid prose and urgent narrative and noted its account of how “community care” meant no community and no care, leaving many severely ill patients on the streets or in prison.⁠[16]

Desperate Remedies was named one of the year’s most notable nonfiction books by The Washington Post and a book of the year by The Times and The Daily Telegraph of London.⁠[10]

In The British Journal of Psychiatry, University of Edinburgh psychiatrist Stephen Lawrie called the book generally impressive and well written and agreed with its criticism of community care as “malign neglect,” but judged the chapters on contemporary psychiatry rushed and found errors or weak arguments on antipsychotics, the dopamine hypothesis and genetics.⁠[17]

He appeared on episode 502 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, whose description calls him a historian of psychiatry; topics included the crisis in psychiatry, asylums and eugenics, the ice-pick lobotomy, malaria therapy, insulin coma therapy, electroconvulsive therapy, Freud and psychoanalysis, antipsychotics and antidepressants.⁠[18]

As of October 2026 UC San Diego lists him as an emeritus professor of sociology; his recent journal articles include “Madness in civilisation” in The Lancet in 2015 and a 2020 History of Psychiatry article on the influence of Foucault’s Folie et déraison.⁠[19]

UC San Diego: Official website: https://ucsd.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[3]

University of Pennsylvania: Official website: https://www.upenn.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[10]

Princeton University: Official website: https://www.princeton.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[10]