The Anatomy of Suicide

by Forbes Winslow

In confirmation of this view of Esquirol’s, the following cases are related:[47]—A gentleman of apparently sound constitution, aged 32, was married to a woman whom he affectionately loved. His affairs became deranged a few years after his marriage, which greatly discouraged him, and rendered him inactive, but without apparently affecting his health. He now embarked in a speculation which promised much advantage, and at first applied himself to business with unremitting assiduity. In the course of a month he encountered some difficulties, which depressed him beyond measure. He considered himself ruined, refused to quit his bed, and would not superintend his workmen, from a conviction that he was no longer capable of directing their operations. He complained of headache, heat in his stomach, &c. His affection for his wife and children, his pecuniary interests, all failed to rouse him from this moral and physical prostration. He reasoned sanely on the critical state of his affairs, and yet made no effort to rescue himself from his difficulties. Eight days passed in this way, when all at once he sprung from his bed in perfect integrity of mind and body. He resumed instantaneously all his activity for business, all his affection for his family. The same state, however, recurred ten or twelve times since, at irregular intervals, caused in general by trifling contrarieties of business, which, under other circumstances, would be considered as nothing. During several of these paroxysms he had impulses to suicide; but this dreaded catastrophe has not yet taken place.

A female was admitted into the Salpetriere on the 23d of September, 1819, in the 34th year of her age, and fourteen years after marriage. At the age of 21 she had a child, after which she was affected with an ulcer in the foot, which was healed in six months. From this time she was troubled with cardialgia, at first slight, but afterwards with intense pain and vomiting of her food. At the age of 33 she became irresolute in her ideas and actions. She expressed an aversion for those things which she had been previously pleased with, and was occasionally incoherent. After suffering from other derangements of her general health, she abandoned her household affairs, became quite despondent, and tried more than once to commit suicide. In this state she was admitted into the hospital, and was put upon diluents, low diet, &c. As she shewed indications of having recovered, she was allowed to return to her family; but in a short period she was harassed with gloomy ideas, despaired of recovery, and expressed a desire to quit life, the duties of which she said she was no longer able to fulfil.

In the case of Cowper, we have a melancholy instance of hypochondriasis leading to suicidal mental derangement. That the poet’s mind was unsound when he attempted to kill himself, must be evident to those who are conversant with the history of his life. He never appears to have been free from hypochondriacal disorder. In a letter to Lady Hesketh, he says, “Could I be translated to paradise, unless I could leave my body behind me, my melancholy would cleave to me there.” A friend procured him the situation of reading clerk to the House of Lords, forgetting that the nervous shyness which made a public exhibition of himself “mortal poison,” would render it impossible for him ever to discharge the duties of his office. This difficulty presented itself to the mind of the poet, and gloom instantly enveloped his faculties. At his request, his situation was changed to that of clerk of the journals; but even before he could be installed into office he was threatened with a public examination before the House. This made him completely wretched; he had not resolution to decline what he had not strength to do: the interest of his friend, and his own reputation and want of support, pressed him forward to an attempt which he knew from the first could never succeed. In this miserable state, like Goldsmith’s traveller,

“To stop too fearful, and too faint to go,”

he attended every day for six months at the office where he was to examine the journals in preparation for his trust. His feelings were like those of a man at the place of execution, every time he entered the office door; and he only gazed mechanically at the books, without drawing from them the least portion of information he wanted. As the time of his examination approached, his agony became more and more intense; he hoped and believed that madness would come to relieve him; he attempted also to make up his mind to suicide, though his conscience bore stern testimony against it; he could not by any argument persuade himself that it was right; but his desperation prevailed, and he procured from an apothecary the means of self-destruction. On the day before his public appearance was to be made, he happened to notice a letter in the newspaper, which to his disordered mind seemed like a malignant libel on himself. He immediately threw down the paper, and rushed into the fields, determined to die in a ditch; but the thought struck him that he might escape from the country. With the same violence he proceeded to make hasty preparations for his flight; but while he was engaged in packing his portmanteau his mind changed, and he threw himself into a coach, ordering the man to drive to the Tower wharf, intending to throw himself into the river, and not reflecting that it would be impossible to accomplish his purpose, in that public spot, unobserved. On approaching the water, he found a porter seated upon some goods; he then returned to the coach, and drove home to his lodgings in the Temple. On the way, he attempted to drink the laudanum, but as often as he raised it, a convulsive agitation of his frame prevented its reaching his lips; and thus, regretting the loss of the opportunity, but unable to avail himself of it, he arrived half dead with anguish at his apartments. He then closed the door and threw himself on the bed, with the laudanum near him, trying to lash himself up to the deed; but a voice within seemed constantly to forbid it; and as often as he extended his hand to the poison, his fingers were contracted, and held back by spasms. At this time some of the inmates of the place came in, but he concealed his agitation; and as soon as he was left alone, a change came over him, and so detestable did the deed appear, that he threw away the laudanum, and dashed the phial to pieces. The rest of the day was spent in heavy insensibility, and at night he slept as usual; but on waking at three in the morning, he took his penknife and laid with his weight upon it, the point being directed towards his heart. It was broken, and would not penetrate. At day-break he rose, and passing a strong garter round his neck, fastened it to the frame of his bed. This gave way with his weight; but on securing it to the door, he was more successful, and remained suspended until he had lost all consciousness of existence. After a time, the garter broke, and he fell to the floor, so that his life was saved; but the conflict had been greater than his reason could endure. He felt a contempt for himself not to be expressed or imagined. Whenever he went into the street, it seemed as if every eye flashed upon him with indignation and scorn. He felt as if he had offended God so deeply that his guilt could never be forgiven, and his whole heart was filled with pangs of tumultuous despair.[48]

When Cowper had once admitted the thought of self-destruction, he could not go into the street without meeting with something to tempt or drive him to the act. It seemed to him as if the whole world had conspired to make death by his own hand inevitable. When he ventured into the streets, after the failure of all his efforts, a ghastly shame and alarmed suspicion were his torments; and perhaps nothing in Cowper’s autobiography goes deeper into the heart than the following description of his sufferings.

“I never went into the street but I thought the people stood and laughed at me, and held me in contempt; and could hardly persuade myself but that the voice of conscience was loud enough for any one to hear it. They who knew me, appeared to avoid me, and if they spoke to me, seemed to do it in scorn. I bought a ballad of one who was singing it in the street, because I thought it was written on me. I dined alone, either at a tavern, where I went in the dark, or at the chop-house, where I always took care to hide myself in the darkest corner of the room. I slept generally an hour in the evening, but it was only to be terrified in dreams; and when I awoke, it was some time before I could steadily walk through the passage into the dining-room. I reeled and staggered like a drunken man. The eyes of man I did not fear; but when I thought that the eyes of God were upon me, (which I felt assured of,) it gave me the most intolerable anguish. If, for a moment, a book or a companion stole away my attention from myself, a flash from hell seemed to be thrown into my mind immediately; and I said within myself, ‘What are these things to me, who am damned?’”

Cowper is not the only instance, however, of a man of exquisite taste and genius whose life has been rendered miserable by hypochondria. We have alluded elsewhere to Byron’s morbid sensitiveness, and the reader’s attention is now called to the influence of hypochondriasis on the poet’s mind. He says in his journal, “What can be the reason I awake every morning in actual despair and despondency?” He had a great apprehension of insanity. In order to overcome his melancholy, considering that his diet had much to do with it, he put himself under a strict regimen, avoiding most scrupulously all animal food. He states that his diet for a week consisted of tea and six dry biscuits per diem. After having indulged in an ordinary dinner, he writes, “I wish to God I had not dined now; it kills me with heaviness; and yet it was but a pint of bucellas, and fish. Oh, my head! how it aches!—the horrors of indigestion!” Again he says, “This head was given me to ache with.” After a severe fit of indigestion, he writes, “I’ve no more charity than a vinegar cruet. Would that I were an ostrich, and dieted on fire-irons! O fool! I shall go mad!”

Burns suffered much from indigestion, producing hypochondria. Writing to his friend, Mr. Cunningham, he says, “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased? Canst thou speak peace and rest to a soul tost on a sea of troubles, without one friendly star to guide her course, and dreading that the next surge may overwhelm her? Canst thou give to a frame tremblingly alive to the tortures of suspense the stability and hardihood of a rock that braves the blast? If thou canst not do the least of these, why wouldst thou disturb me in my miseries with thy inquiries after me?” From early life, the poet was subject to a disordered stomach, a disposition to headache, and irregular action of the heart.