From this table it appears that the number of suicides has gradually increased from six as high as twenty-four in eight years. The last year, it decreased to sixteen; and it is fervently hoped that this deduction may be maintained, and that the increase may not be so frightfully rapid as it appears to have been. It must, however, be taken into account, that the population was, in 1822, 51,113, and in 1834, 56,655. The police also are more active, and inquests are held more regularly.
CHAPTER XIV.
APPEARANCES PRESENTED AFTER DEATH IN THOSE WHO HAVE COMMITTED SUICIDE.
Thickness of cranium—State of membranes and vessels of brain—Osseous excrescences—Appearances discovered in one thousand three hundred and thirty-three cases—Lesions of the lungs, heart, stomach, and intestines—Effect of long-continued indigestion.
As in cases of insanity, the morbid appearances discovered in the bodies of suicides are varied and contradictory. Nothing has yet been detected which can lead the pathologist to a correct conclusion as to the nature of the organic change which precedes and accompanies the suicidal mania.
The cranium has in many cases been found preternaturally thick, and in others the reverse. Greeding and Gall give their testimony in favour of the skull’s thickness. Out of 216 examined, a preternatural thickness of cranium was found in 167. Out of 100 who died of furious mania, 78 had the skull thick, and 20 very thin. Out of 30 fatuous patients, 21 had thick crania, and six thin. The thickness of the cranial bones in melancholy and maniacal patients, and in old people, was supposed by Dr. Gall to be connected with diminished size of the brain, to which the inner table of the cranial bone accommodated itself; and together with this thickness, he considered there was also thickness of the membranes, and ossification of the blood-vessels.
Malformations of the cranium are often detected. Osiander relates the case of an old man who had suffered for a considerable time from dreadful headache, and who, weary of life, hanged himself. On examining the head, small osseous excrescences were found near the carotid foramen. Lancisi refers to a case of hypochondriasis and suicide, in which, after death, a sharp long excrescence was found near the apex of the lambdoid suture.