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The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700-1900.
The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain 1700-1900. By Andrew Scull (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993) 442 pp. $45.00
In this expansion and reworking of his 1979 Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in 19th Century England (New York, 1979), Scull points out irony at every turn--the irony that the emergence of the asylum and the psychiatric profession paralleled an increase in the number of the insane (334); the irony that the supposedly humanitarian asylum provided a convenient mechanism for poor and working-class families to abandon troublesome relatives ("the impossible, the inconvenient, and the inept") (370); the irony …
