EPIDEMIC SUICIDE; SUICIDE FROM IMITATION, AND DESIRE FOR NOTORIETY.
In relation to lunacy and mental disturbance, I must now refer to the
question of Epidemic and Imitational Suicide.
No crime seems to have so strong a tendency to spread by example and
imitation as this one. Epidemics have occurred on many occasions, and
I have already mentioned an epidemic of suicide taking place among the
soldiers of Tarquinius Superbus.
At Alexandria, in the time of the Ptolemies, an epidemic was originated
by Hegesias the philosopher, who discoursed so eloquently on the
numerous trials of this life and the pleasures of death, that numbers
of persons destroyed themselves; and the philosopher was banished.
When Xanthus, a city of Lycia, was conquered by Brutus, the citizens
slew themselves by hundreds.
At Miletus the women committed suicide in large numbers, because their
husbands and lovers were detained by the wars: they hanged themselves;
the frenzy was checked by an edict that their bodies were to be dragged
naked through the streets. Other examples of wholesale suicide are
shown by the people of Sidon, who burned their city and themselves
when besieged by Artaxerxes Ochus, by the Tyrians when conquered by
Alexander, and by the Acheans when defeated by Metellus.
At Marseilles, an old historian records that at one time the young
women made it quite a habit to kill themselves when their lovers were
not constant to them.─(Esquirol.)
Large numbers of suicides were committed by Christians in the terrible
times of persecution in the reigns of Nero, Decius, and Diocletian.
In the dancing mania and the follies of Tarantulism in Naples, between
1500 and 1600, the patients often thronged in crowds to the sea shore,
and rushed singing into the waves, as Lecky narrates.
An epidemic of drowning affecting women alone also occurred at Lyons;
these cases had no apparent cause; it was checked by an order to expose
all the bodies naked in the market. _See_ Spon, “Histoire de la Ville
de Lyon,” 1676, and Primerosius Jacobus, “De mulierum morbis,” 1665.
Sydenham is the authority for the statement that suicide prevailed to
an alarming degree in Mansfield in the year 1697; and at Versailles, in
1793, 300 persons killed themselves. At Rouen in 1806, at Stuttgardt in
1811, epidemics occurred. In Valois an epidemic of hanging took place
in 1813, see Sydenham, “Complete Works,” vol. ii. In July and August
1806, 300 persons committed suicide in Copenhagen; these cases formed a
distinctly marked epidemic. Suicide is almost epidemic, or endemic, in
connection with the disease Pellagra in Italy, Spain, and the South of
France. It is said that one-third of the victims of this disease kill
themselves. This scourge appears to be a nervous affection, associated
with erythema and degeneration of the skin, and dependent partly on the
effect of the sun, especially in spring, and partly on the consumption
of unhealthy maize as food; its most usual termination is in dementia.
Groups of Suicides from Imitation, almost amounting to minute
epidemics, have occurred from several churches, monuments, and elevated
structures, their great height being the incentive to the victim to
throw himself off; such are the Duomo of Milan, St. Peter’s at Rome,
the Campanile of Giotto, Florence, the Vendôme Column, Paris, the
Monument, London, the Suspension Bridge at Clifton, and the Archway
at Highgate; from this last viaduct, which is protected only by a low
wall, there have been four suicides in as many months; in response to
repeated representations from Dr. Danford Thomas and myself, the Local
Board have at last undertaken to put up a railing on this bridge.
After the suicide of Lord Castlereagh, a large number of persons put
an end to their lives in the same manner. Several imitational suicides
and suicidal attempts occurred in 1841, following the drowning of a
young woman in the Thames. She left a letter behind her, explaining her
unfortunate love affairs; her case made a great noise at the time, and
much public fuss and public sympathy were shewn on her behalf, and no
doubt led to her successors’ deaths.
After a tragedy at Pentonville, in 1842, in which a man cut the
throats of his children and then committed suicide himself, there were
within a week two similar cases.
At a meeting of the French Academy of Medicine, 1827, Dr. Costel
related that, in Paris, at the Hotel des Invalides, a soldier having
hung himself on a post, his example was in a very short time followed
by twelve other invalided soldiers. The post was removed, and there
were no more cases in the building for a considerable period.
Legoyt narrates that the drama of “Chatterton,” by M. de Vigny, when
performed in Paris, caused many persons to kill themselves in imitation
of the hero; and he asserts that the same effect has followed, in
France, the study of Ugo Foscolo’s “Jacopo Ortis,” Byron’s “Manfred,”
Chateaubriand’s “René,” Constant’s “Adolphus,” and Lamartine’s
“Raphael.”
Dr. Ebrard, in “Le Suicide,” 1870, condemns the teaching of the stories
of the Stoics and their suicides to schoolboys, thinking it blameworthy
to familiarise the youthful mind with the idea of self-destruction.
In Germany, many references in the literature of our time may be found,
in which the study of Pessimism,─the doctrines of Schopenhauer (d.
1860), are blamed for decoying men to self-destruction.
The following notice is cut from a newspaper, April 1885:
No less than seven suicides effected or attempted were reported in
Paris one day last week. At five in the morning, a packing-case maker
in the Faubourg St. Martin, named Rozette, took a dose of laudanum,
and was removed to a hospital in a critical state; at seven, a
messenger was found hanging in his lodgings at an hotel in the Rue
de Chartres; about the same time a concierge at 16, Rue Chalgrin,
committed suicide with charcoal; at eight, a retired tradesman, aged
62, killed himself by firing a revolver in his mouth; at one, a man
living in the Place de la Chapelle, stabbed himself with a shoemaker’s
knife; at four, a porter at the Central Markets shot himself with
a revolver; and lastly, at ten in the evening, a tailor, living at
the Rue Bonaparte, shot himself twice in the head while riding in a
cab.─_Galignani._
I have reason to believe that it is perfectly true (although it has
been denied) that a very considerable number of French officers and men
slew themselves in the confusion and headlong retreat which followed
the general advance of the English line, at the close of the battle
of Waterloo, when the confusion was made worse confounded by the
additional onslaught of the Prussians from the flank.
M. Legoyt also narrates this statement as authentic, and there is no
inherent improbability in it, if we consider that among those who fled,
were the “Old Guard” who had never known defeat.
The love of notoriety also comes in for mention in this place. One
man has killed himself by attaching his body to a rocket, and then
setting fire to the fuse; nothing but a desire to be notorious seems to
explain this action. Another man threw himself into the crater of Mount
Vesuvius. Empedocles, the philosopher, threw himself into the crater of
Mount Etna.
Soon after the death of Miss Moyes the first of a series of suicides
from the Monument, London, Elam narrates that a lad took poison
with the intent to kill himself; when questioned by the police, he
answered, “I wished to be talked about, like the woman who threw
herself off the Monument.” And this is a very fair example of many
instances of voluntary death, but whether it forms a good public policy
to call those sufferers insane is questionable: personally, I think
that such persons are encouraged by the neglect to stigmatise them as
criminals.
It is not every suicide from a dangerous height that is caused by
imitation; there does undoubtedly exist a peculiar form of fascination,
apt to arise from a sense of insecurity, such as occurs to a person
standing on a cliff or a house top, and I am convinced that this
fascination does cause many _involuntary_ suicides.
Mental debility is a cause of it, and so is dyspepsia, and I expect
that like lack of courage it is a matter of lack of health. Other
forms of this weakness are occasionally seen; some men dare not trust
themselves with a razor, and others have a terror of handling a
revolver.
Improvement of health, strong mental effort, and custom remove these
unpleasant feelings.