Back to Bedlam: Patrick Skene Catling on the book that makes madness visible

Madness is an ancient, evidently inscrutable mystery, often regarded with superstitious fear, yet can provide a refuge from reality. Sometimes, however, the refuge turns out to be a trap. The human brain, beyond even the most rigorous thinker’s continuous control, is equally able to afford exquisite privacy and atrocious chaos.

Andrew Scull, born in Scotland and educated at Oxford and Princeton, a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of psychiatric books highly esteemed by medical historians on both sides of the Atlantic, has now written a learned, liberally humanitarian and wryly witty account of how people in civilised societies have tried for more than 2,000 years to limit the amount of harm done by mental abnormality. He writes with such admirable verve and lucidity that it is sad to note that his thesis is gloomy. He comprehensively demonstrates that nobody has ever been able to achieve anything better than keeping madness locked away out of sight or, at best in public view, suppressing its symptoms.

At the outset of this complexly suggestive, profusely illustrated work, Scull promises to consider madness medically and in its social and cultural ramifications. Madness, he observes, remains

a source of recurrent fascination for writers and artists and their audiences. Novels, biographies, autobiographies, plays, films, paintings, sculpture — in all these realms and more, Unreason continues to haunt the imagination and to surface in powerful and unpredictable ways.

The book abounds in references to literature and other arts, none more aptly than Dryden’s couplet, ‘Great wits are sure to madness near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide.’

Writers who entertainingly illuminate Scull’s text include Shakespeare, whose Titus Andronicus of all his tragedies is the most pathologically frenzied, Cervantes, whose hero Don Quixote attains sanity only as he is dying, and Henry Mackenzie, an 18th-century novelist whom Scull calls an exploiter of a ‘mawkish but lucrative sector of the literary marketplace’, whose bestseller The Man of Feeling describes a visit to Bedlam.