Rensselaer Republican, Volume 20, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 July 1888 — Suicide in the United States. [ARTICLE]

Suicide in the United States.

Cincinnati Enquirer. That the temptation to kill oneself occasionally attacks, in an abnormal degree, the people of a particular locality is a fact first noted by the statistical writers of France. Boismopt and Bertrand have made the disease a study,and while recognizing that it is always and everywhere idiopathic they clearly demonstrate that it is often amazingly epidemic. Such an epidemic has made itself manifest in all the large cities of this country in the last months, and nowhere more than in the cities of the Ohio Valley. Here in Cincinnati and its suburbs the pestilence has been mournfully prevalent. In the six months ending Saturday night we had forty-three cases—more than in all the year of 1887, and four-fifths of these occurred in the last three months. The French statistics show a vast preponderance of male suicides over female, and in all other sections where reliable details are obtainable this distinction is maintained. But it has fallen away, this summer, in the United States —the gentler sex has run nearly even with the sterner. The principle which Boismont most vigorously fights for, that men who work with their muscles rarely kill themselves, finds sound support in the late American record —it is the artisan rather than the laborer, the professional man instead of the farmer, who contributes to the suicidal crop. Those whose daily life gives rigorous action to the lungs do not commit self-murder.

But our average is growing to be startlingly large. Estimating the total population of these United States at 60,000,000, there committed suicide in the year ending yesterday not less than one in every 15,000. And when it is further pointed out that nine-tenths of these self-murders occurred in our large cities, it becomes manifest that we are beating the world in this infant industry.