He is a distinguished professor of sociology and science studies at University of California, San Diego, and recipient of the Roy Porter Medal for lifetime contributions to the history of medicine.
[1] His books include Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, and Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry's Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness.
[3] A revised version of his Princeton doctoral dissertation, Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in 19th Century England, was published in 1979 by Allen Lane (London) and St. Martin's Press (New York).
[5][6][7][8] Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry's Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness (The Belknap Press, 2022).
In the summer of 2009, Scull authored a letter to the University of California Regents that called for reallocation of funding from the Riverside, Santa Cruz, and Merced campuses to make up for budget shortfalls at what he deemed "higher tiered" campuses, stating that rather than being research heavy institutions and thus draws for grant and philanthropic moneys, "UCSC, UCR and UC Merced are in substantial measure teaching institutions" [9] and that "[i]f we don't do this, we will end up with a bunch of mediocre U.C.