Accounting for Self‐Destruction: Morselli, Moral Statistics and the Modernity of Suicide

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Notes

¹ E. Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, translated by J.A. Spaulding and G. Simpson (New York: Free Press, 1951), 391.

² A. Giddens, ‘The Suicide Problem in French Sociology’, The British Journal of Sociology, 16:1 (1965), 3–18, at 4.

³ Durkheim, Suicide, 391.

⁴ A leading figure in Italian psychiatry, Enrico (Henry) Morselli (1852–1929) studied at the University of Modena and taught medicine and anthropology at the Royal University in Turin before taking positions as professor and director of the psychiatric clinic at the University of Genoa, where he remained from 1889 until his death. He published extensively on subjects ranging from psychiatry and anthropology to the philosophy of the social sciences and spiritualism, and helped to introduce the works of Darwin, Freud, and Haeckel to Italian readers. On Morselli's contributions and influence, see P. Guarnieri, ‘Between Soma and Psyche: Morselli and Psychiatry in Late‐nineteenth‐century Italy’, in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, Volume 3, The Asylum and its Psychiatry, edited by W.F. Bynum, R. Porter and M. Shepherd (London: Routledge, 2005), 102–24.

⁵ S. Turner, ‘Durkheim among the statisticians’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 32:4 (1996), 354–78.

⁶ S. Piggott, Suicide and Its Antidotes: A Series of Anecdotes and Actual Narratives, with Suggestions of Mental Distress (London, 1824), 11–12.

⁷ F. Winslow, ‘On suicide’, The London Medical Gazette, 1 (1839), 437–63, at 462–3.

⁸ H. Morselli, Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics (New York, 1882), 15.

⁹ Morselli, Suicide, 22.

¹⁰ Morselli, Suicide, 23.

¹¹ See, for example, J.D. Douglas, The Social Meanings of Suicide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967).

¹² According to Morselli, the official collection of suicide statistics coincided with the first decades of the nineteenth century – France began recording statistics in 1817, Norway and Prussia in 1816, Austria in 1819, and the remainder of the European states soon thereafter. Morselli, Suicide, 3–4.

¹³ I. Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2.

¹⁴ Among these contributions are T.M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking 1820–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); S. Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth‐Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); L. Schweber, Disciplining Statistics: Demography and Vital Statistics in France and England, 1830–1885 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); and S. Woolf, ‘Statistics and the Modern State’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31:3 (1989), 588–604.

¹⁵ H. Westergaard, Contributions to the History of Statistics (New York: Agathon Press, 1968), 141.

¹⁶ Porter, Rise of Statistical Thinking, 41.

¹⁷ On Süssmilch's place in the history of statistics, see V. John, ‘The Term “Statistics”’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 46:4 (1883), 656–79 at 667–9. Like John, Durkheim nominated Süssmilch as the ‘true founder of moral statistics’ on the basis of his attention to the statistical regularity of moral phenomena. Durkheim, Suicide, 300.

¹⁸ A. Quetelet, A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties (Edinburgh, 1842), 80.

¹⁹ H.T. Buckle, History of Civilization in England, 2 vols. (London, 1857–61), vol. 1, 25–6.

²⁰ Morselli, Suicide, 16.

²¹ Morselli, Suicide, 1–2.

²² A.M. Guerry, Essay on the Moral Statistics of France: A Sociological Report to the French Academy of Science, translated by H.P. Whitt and V.W. Reinking (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), 132.

²³ Guerry, Moral Statistics of France, 132–3.

²⁴ B. de Boismont, Du Suicide et de la Folie Suicide, second edition (Paris, 1865), 297.

²⁵ Morselli, Suicide, 266–7.

²⁶ Morselli, Suicide, 269.

²⁷ Morselli, Suicide, 271.

²⁸ Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 143.

²⁹ Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 139.

³⁰ Morselli, Suicide, 2–3. In his preface to the English translation, Morselli emphasized this connection between statistical practices and social and cultural modernization, explaining that one of his desires in having Suicide translated for foreign readers was to demonstrate that his nation's contributions to the moral sciences placed it ‘on a level with the most advanced and civilized nations of Europe’. Morselli, Suicide, viii.

³¹ Morselli, Suicide, 372.

³² For example, A. Legoyt, Le Suicide Ancien et Moderne: Étude Historique, Philosophique, Morale et Statistique (Paris, 1881).

³³ T.G. Masaryk, Suicide and the Meaning of Civilization, translated by W.B. Weist and R.G. Batson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 4.

³⁴ For example, Forbes Winslow, the leading English medical expert on suicide, asserted that all suicides were the result of mental derangements, a position also held by his preeminent French contemporary, Etienne Esquirol. F. Winslow, The Anatomy of Suicide (London, 1840); E. Esquirol, Mental Maladies; A Treatise on Insanity, translated by E.K. Hunt (Philadelphia, PA, 1845).

³⁵ Morselli, Suicide, 11.

³⁶ Morselli, Suicide, 10.

³⁷ I. Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 19–44. Paperno points out that in the introduction to the Italian edition of Suicide, Morselli refers to statistics as a ‘genuine process of social autopsy’. Paperno, Suicide, 35.

³⁸ Morselli, Suicide, x.

³⁹ Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood, 61–84.

⁴⁰ Morselli, Suicide, 37–9.

⁴¹ Morselli, Suicide, 81.

⁴² Morselli, Suicide, 189–92.

⁴³ See J. Cole, The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth‐Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 8–9.

⁴⁴ M. Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830–1864 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 29.

⁴⁵ Morselli, Suicide, 2.

⁴⁶ Morselli, Suicide, 233.

⁴⁷ Morselli, Suicide, 248.

⁴⁸ Morselli, Suicide, vii.

⁴⁹ Review of H. Morselli, Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics, The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 9 (1882), 603–8, at 607.

⁵⁰ Review of Morselli, Suicide, 603.

⁵¹ Durkheim, Suicide, 51.

⁵² Or as the reviewer from the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease wryly suggested, ‘statistics might conceivably be collected to prove the uniform increase of the eating of turtle‐soup, or the compilation of dry‐as‐dust folios; though neither of these practices could prudently be described as being as much beyond the individual's control as birth, death, or even marriage.’ Review of Morselli, Suicide, 605.

⁵³ Durkheim, Suicide, 45.

⁵⁴ J. Tissot, De la Manie du Suicide et de L'Esprit de Révolte (Paris, 1840), 3.

⁵⁵ G. Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, translated by C.R. Fawcett (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

⁵⁶ K. Marx, Marx on Suicide, translated by E.A. Plaut, G. Edgcomb, and K. Anderson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 64 [original italics].

⁵⁸ Morselli, Suicide, 372.

⁵⁷ Morselli, Suicide, 353.

⁵⁹ M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970), 251.

⁶⁴ Morselli, Suicide, 361.

⁶⁰ In his conclusion, Morselli suggested that the hundreds of pages worth of statistical correlations and analysis that he had enumerated may have been done in order to lead up to a conclusion he wished not to reveal until the end. ‘However, in investigating and summing up the laws of suicide from the aggregates of facts, we have purposely passed over silently the opinion as to its nature which might be drawn from them.’ Morselli, Suicide, 354.

⁶¹ Morselli, Suicide, 364.

⁶² Morselli, Suicide, 372.

⁶³ ‘By applying to this social phenomenon the eminently positive method of numerical progression and of proportional averages’, Morselli concluded, ‘we have discovered its organic character, so to speak, have stood clearly its inward workings, and have explained scientifically its historical evolution.’ Morselli, Suicide, 353.

⁶⁵ Morselli, Suicide, 372.

⁶⁶ Morselli, Suicide, 373–4.

⁶⁷ S. Strahan, Suicide and Insanity: A Physiological and Sociological Study (London, 1893), 126.

⁶⁸ Morselli, Suicide, 118–19.