![]() ![]() ![]() “What circumstances would have suggested a risk of suicide to a Victorian or Edwardian family doctor who had read a standard manual or attended a course of lectures on mental disease? First and foremost, he assuredly would’ve known that every patient suffering from mental depression (and hence incipient melancholia) was a potential suicide, but that suicide was comparatively rare in other forms of insanity.” 3 ![]() Olive Anderson makes the following remark about suicidality in her now classic study on suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England: Whether a patient was deemed “suicidal” or not was in the first instance pronounced prior to admission, as it was one of the items of information required by the reception order accompanying the medical certificates of insanity. The category “suicidal”, transferred from reception orders into admissions registers and onto the pages of patient case books, produced tables displaying the number of patients with “suicidal propensities” residing in the asylum at any one time. 2 In contrast, medical certificates of insanity enabled a different kind of statistical knowledge about suicide to arise within the walls of the Victorian asylum. Historians have drawn attention to some of the ways in which the budding science of statistics came to bear upon suicide in nineteenth-century Europe, a development in which social environment became central to the perceived incidence of self-accomplished deaths within a nation or group of people, and which culminated in Durkheim’s famous 1897 study. ![]()
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