Date: Monday, June 29th
Time: 8pm
Admission: $8 ( Tickets Here )
Location: Morbid Anatomy Museum, 424 Third Avenue, 11215 Brooklyn NY

Introduction by Susannah Cahalan, Author of Brain on Fire, presented by Shannon Taggart, Morbid Anatomy Museum Programmer in Residence

Tonight, join us for an evening of images and discussion about the relationship between madness, culture, and meaning with Andrew Scull, author of the recently published Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine

Modern psychiatry seems determined to rob madness of its meanings, insisting that its depredations can be reduced to biology and nothing but biology. One must doubt it. The social and cultural dimensions of mental disorders, so indispensable a part of the story of madness and civilization over the centuries, are unlikely to melt away, or to prove no more than an epiphenomenal feature of so universal a feature of human existence. Madness indeed has its meanings, elusive and evanescent as our attempts to capture them have been. Western culture throughout its long and tangled history provides us with a rich array of images of diverse sorts, a remarkable set of windows into both popular and latterly professional beliefs about insanity.

Andrew Scull received his B.A. from Oxford University, and his Ph.D. from Princeton. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton prior to coming to UC San Diego. His books include Museums of Madness; Decarceration; Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen; Durkheim and the Law (with Steven Lukes); Social Control and the State (with Stanley Cohen); Social Order/Mental Disorder; The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700-1900; and Masters of Bedlam. His articles have appeared in leading journals in a variety of disciplines, including British Journal of Psychiatry, Psychological Review; European Journal of Sociology; Medical History. He has held fellowships from (among others) the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Davis Center for Historical Studies, and in 1992-93 was the president of the Society for the Social History of Medicine.