Suicide : an essay on comparative moral statistics / by Henry Morselli.

  • Enrico Morselli
Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Suicide : an essay on comparative moral statistics / by Henry Morselli. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    events especially helped it. And since nations are consti- tuted, by developing, and transforming themselves through millions of individuals, it was natm^al that the science of order and numbers should be applied in a uniform way to the progression of living and operating numbers. From this was brought to light that perpetual element of force and developement, the principle of organic and functional transformation, or the dynamics of j^'Opulation. The old philosophy of individuahsm had given to suicide the character of Uberty and spontaneity, but now it became necessary to study it no longer as the expres- sion of individual and independent faculties, but certainly as a social phenomenon allied with all the other racial forces. The real statistics of suicide began only in our cen- tury, and even late in it. It is true that from the end of the eighteenth centmy data were being collected in Switz- erland and Paris (Mercier, 1783), but they were isolated figm*es, and perhaps on account of little exactitude not serviceable for analysis ; later they were of value, how- ever, in establishing the important statistical law of the progressive growth of suicide in civilized countries. To Switzerland belongs the credit of having been the first to gather its facts from the entire population ; while France has the honom* of having undertaken the regular and uniform publication of them in the registers of the ]\Iinister of Grace and Justice (1817-27). At the same time official statistics were begun in some other European States—Mecklenbm-g (1811), Prussia (1816), Xorway (1816), and Austria (1819); which examples, on account of the impulse given to statistical works by the com'age of the first sociologists, were followed by Hanover, the Canton of Greneva, Belgium, Saxony, Denmark, Bavai'ia, England, and so on by all the Em'opean States, from the B 2