ABSTRACT
Though a relative innovation in thanatology, reflective critical engagement with the history of self-inflicted death has changed our understanding of past perceptions of suicide and current practices in suicidology. Condemned in pre-modern Christianity as an egregious sin and a crime, Europeans punished self-murderers with financial penalties and dishonor. The Enlightenment may have decriminalized suicide in most places (with the notable exception of Great Britain), but a pejorative stigma remained. The inventor of the term suicidology, Dutch criminologist Willem Adriaan Bonger, also discovered that the scientific study of suicide and suicidal behaviors had a significant past. This essay considers the early suicidologists in the context of modern nation building and professionalization following the Napoleonic Wars. It examines the history of fields whose early growth was closely associated with the study of suicide. From the early beginnings of alienist psychiatry, moral statistics and social physics (a.k.a sociology), these professionals joined forces with the modern state from France and Italy to Russia and Scandinavia in a national project for the measurement and control of human resources. Ultimately, their methods had global influence, though prejudices against suicide and the extent of self-killing have remained constant.
