Heredity.
The influence of Hereditary Predisposition is one of surpassing interest, but is also another of those causes of which it is very difficult to procure accurate statistics; and very few countries have as yet given any data in connection with it.
Relations of suicides are apt to be very reticent of confessing to lunacy in their families, and it is hereditary mental failure, lunacy, epilepsy, dipsomania, &c., which are the forerunners of a future death by suicide.
In Bavaria alone has an effort been made to estimate hereditary influence; from 1857-66, we are told it was shewn to exist in 13 per cent. of all voluntary deaths, since then in 18 per cent.
Voltaire narrates that he knew a professional man, his brother, and the father of both, who all killed themselves at the same age, in the same manner.
Bucknill and Tuke give examples of suicide from hereditary insanity, and remark, “that they abound;” similar cases will be found described in almost all works treating of insanity.
Falret gives several cases, for example:─In one, a grandmother, mother, and grandchild, killed themselves. In another, five sons and one daughter, of a questionably sane father, all committed the act.
Griesinger gives us an example:─A man and his wife became insane, he hung himself and she drowned herself; one daughter poisoned herself, a son strangled himself, and another daughter threw herself off a house top.
In Lisle, on “Suicide,” ten marked cases are given.
Burrows narrates, at full length, the case of one family, as follows:─The grandfather hanged himself; he left four sons, one hanged himself, one cut his throat, one drowned himself, and one died a natural death. Two of these sons had large families; of the third, two children became insane, one died a natural death, the other made several attempts on his life, and two others drowned themselves, apparently sane.
The effect of mental agitation in a person knowing that he is the descendant of insane persons or of suicides, is worthy of consideration; to a well-educated man, what a “skeleton in the closet” to live with, must be the constant recollection of the risk to which hereditary transmission exposes him. Such a spectre may well refuse to be laid, and must be a fertile cause in the production of another generation of suicides.