Madness is something that frightens and fascinates us all.
Throughout this fascinating history, many fascinating and arresting pictures illuminate the overall portrait of madness in its various contexts..
Perhaps most important, he conveys how madness profoundly disturbs our common sense assumptions; threatens the social order, both symbolically and practically; creates almost unbearable disruptions in the texture of daily living; and turns our experience and our expectations upside down.
He also describes how a whole industry has grown up, devoted to its management and suppression.
He shows that through the centuries, in poetry and in prose, in drama and in the visual arts, madness has been on display for all to see.
In this Very Short Introduction , Andrew Scull provides a provocative and entertaining examination of the social, cultural, medical, and artistic responses to mental disturbance across more than two millennia, concluding with some observations on the contemporary accounts of mental illness.
It is a word with which we are universally familiar, and a condition that haunts the human imagination.
Madness is something that frightens and fascinates us all
