Madness in Civilization (2015)

Mental illness gets thin coverage in most general histories, so this fills the biggest gap on the list. Scull runs from madness in the ancient world and the Bible through exorcism, mesmerism and the asylum era to Freud and modern drug treatment. He treats madness as woven into each society rather than a purely medical problem, which keeps the people who were confined and treated in view alongside the doctors and their theories. Freud and the psychoanalysts get an interlude rather than a throne. The focus is mainly on Europe and North America, but as a single readable volume on how medicine has handled the mind, it is hard to beat.