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.”