ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century, had there been chairs in psychiatry, the Professor of Epidemiological Psychiatry would have been called something like ‘Professor of the Statistics of Insanity’. The Oxford English Dictionary is only moderately helpful in explaining why someone should occupy a chair in Epidemiological Psychiatry. 'Psychiatry' was even slower than ‘epidemics’ and its derivatives in establishing itself in the English language. Three articles in particular are relevant to the history of epidemiological psychiatry: ‘Epidemic insanity’, ‘Statistics of insanity’, and ‘Suicide’. Suicide occupies a special place within the history of the social sciences, principally because of Durkheim’s classic monograph, which was first published five years after Tuke’s Dictionary. Victorian and Edwardian suicide has recently been brilliantly examined by Olive Anderson, who has amply substantiated Tuke’s suspicions about the quality of the statistics, even as they relate to Tuke’s own country, let alone to other parts of Europe.
