According to our ingenious author, drunkenness is the chief cause of suicide in England, Prussia, and Germany; love and gambling in France; whilst bigotry, or the fear of dying without having received the sacrament, he supposes, prevents it in Spain, where, comparatively speaking, suicide is seldom heard of.
The same remark may apply to Italy, where a Roman lady, having heard of such an action, exclaimed, “Dev’ essere un forestiere; gli Italiani non sono tanto matti.” She was right, the suicide was a melancholy German tailor.
In India, where the doctrine of predestination is generally prevalent, it is calculated that in one year there were forty suicides in a population of 250,000, twenty-three of which were females.
Arntzenius quotes Gall’s opinion, that suicide arises from too great a predominance of the organ of cautiousness. Combe and other phrenologists are of opinion, that with this predominance a deficient development of hope and a large destructiveness must be conjoined.
It has been remarked that in Spain and Portugal, where insanity is comparatively rare, malconformation of the brain and consequent idiotism are very frequent.
Since the peace it may be more difficult to arrive at any conclusion on the subject of increase of lunacy, founded on the admission of lunatics into public and private establishments, since emigration has carried so many families and operatives of every description abroad, many of whom, from various disappointments and vexations, might have been predisposed to insanity.
It appears that in 1836 there existed in England and Wales 6402 lunatics, 7265 idiots—13,667 lunatics and idiots. Of paupers alone, or lunatics and idiots, there were 1.00098 of the total population, or 1 in 1024.
However, according to the most probable calculation, the number of lunatics in England amounts to about 14,000, out of which about 11,000 are paupers. Idiots are nearly as numerous as lunatics. Sir A. Halliday states the former to amount to 5741, and the latter to 6806. To this it must be observed that many harmless idiots are allowed to remain in their usual residence. In Wales it appears that idiots are to lunatics in the proportion of seven to one. The difficulty of obtaining any certain information on this subject, however, is such, that it is scarcely possible to decide the question with any chance of a probable certainty.
In regard to the prevalence of lunacy in other countries, the following are curious statistical statements:
In Spain, in 1817, according to the report of Dr. Luzuriaga, there only existed in the asylums of Toledo, Granada, Cordova, Valencia, Cadiz, Saragossa, and Barcelona, 509 lunatics—only fifty were in the hospitals of Cadiz, sixty in that of Madrid, and thirty-six in the kingdom of Granada.