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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    miglit be supposed, not so much from the before men- tioned diminution in Norway and Denmark, as by the fact that Engiandj once diseased with true suicidal mania, now finds herself at the lower end of the scale of suicide. Some people have exaggerated this cessation of increase of suicide in the United Kingdom so far as to deny its general laws of increase ; but the observation of facts and the numerous reasons alleged by Legoyt and Oettingen show too well that in England also suicide always main- tains a high degree of elevation, and if it does not show a great increase, it has not up to the present time dimin- ished. The English proportional numbers offer, indeed, a sur- prising constancy, so that Buckle availed himself of it to found the bases of his brilliant doctrine of ' general laws ' which has finally given to history access to the explanation of the origin and developement of civilization. In the actual figures (Tables I. and II.) is to be observed a progressive rise even in the last twenty years; taking the five years' averages we find the real progression to be : 967, 1,025, 1,302, 1,331, 1,459, and 1,525, whilst the relative progres- sion is brought out more distinctly by a comparison of the first and last, which stand respectively in the report as 100 to 164. In the statistical series of English suicides variations are to be remarked, for example in 1839, when England and Wales had only 943, 115 less than the pre- ceding year; but on the whole this regularity exists, and with respect to long periods the law of increase also exists. The periodicals which take most interest in bringing for- ward the benefits of English civilization ('Pall Mall Gazette' [1868], 'British Medical Journal,' 'Journal of Mental Science,' ' Times,' ' Quarterly Eeview') confess this painful truth. And it is to be noticed that the statistics of suicide in England are not conducted with too great