Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 October 1883 — Suicide in Great Cities. [ARTICLE]

Suicide in Great Cities.

The Spectator thinks it not surprising that Paris should be the most given to suicide of any of the large cities. For when pleasure is made the objecand end of life, the sources of it myptet riously grow less and less, until within a very short time all sources of happiness have been swallowed up in a dreadful ennui, which makes death a welcome end. Naples appears to form an exception to the operation of this supposed law, for in a population perhaps the least serious of any in the world, the percentage of suicide is extremely low. The ratios of suicides to eaph million of inhabitants in the chief cities are as follows: Paris, 402, and Stockholm, 354, are the highest. Then the ratio is gradually reduced in Copenhagen, Vienna, Brussels, Dresden, St. Petersburg, Florence, Berlin, New York, Genoa, London, and Rome. London has eighty-seven to the million, and Naples only thirty-four. Taking these figures together and coinparing them with the meteorological and industrial conditions prevailing in the several localities, it would appear that the French fondness for suicide may be due partly, indeed, to want of an object in life, but largely to insufficient nutrition, and to the enfieeblement of vital force by faulty habits. It appears to be a growing opinion among physicians that insufficient food, poor digestion, and worry are the chief causes of insanity, as they also are. of suicide. Chicago News.