Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/679

 At one period in France the fashionable mode of exit was by the inhalation of charcoal-fumes, at another by a leap into the Seine. In London a certain monument had to be closed to visitors to prevent would be suicides from following the example of an original who had thrown himself from the top. A public promenade in Berne, above the Aar, is also much affected by suicides in that vicinity. In this matter of suicide a remarkable example is given of the power influencing to direct imitation, by Dr. Carpenter in his "Mental Physiology." This case was quite devoid of excitement or of any emotional character. He says that Dr. Oppenheim, of Hamburg, having received for dissection the body of a man who had committed suicide by cutting his throat, but who had performed the deed in such an inartistic manner that his death did not take place until after an interval of great suffering, jokingly remarked to his attendant: "If you have any fancy to cut your throat, don't do it in such a bungling way as this—a little more to the left here, and you will cut the carotid artery." The individual to whom this dangerous advice was addressed was a sober, steady man, with a family and a comfortable subsistence; he had never manifested the slightest tendency to suicide, and had no motive to commit it; yet, strange to say, the sight of the corpse and the observation made by Dr. Oppenheim, suggested to his mind the desire to imitate the deed, and this took such firm hold of him that he carried it into execution, fortunately, however, without duly profiting by the anatomical instruction he had received, for he failed to cut the carotid artery, and recovered. Here, plainly, the ideational form of imitation took possession of the man's mind, and forced him to the act. Subsequently to the remark of the Doctor, he had evidently brooded over the matter till the desire to imitate the suicide became irresistible. Had Dr. Oppenheim anticipated any result from a casual remark, he would probably have said: "Don't think about this body after you leave here; occupy your mind with some other subject—if possible, a pleasant one."

A curious case of suicidal mania occurred a few years since, under the writer's own observation, in Essex County, New Jersey, where a young man of feeble intellect, but exceedingly susceptible to praise and sympathetic emotions, committed suicide, with the evident intent of drawing out the pity and sympathy of his friends. He had attended one or more funerals where eulogies of the deceased, flowers, and other tokens of kind feeling abounded, and he desired to be in the place of the corpse, and to know that such a scene would be imitated in his case—his limited reasoning powers not suggesting that he would then be insensible to the friendly manifestations. The imitative instinct was too strong for the reflective faculties and determined the fatal act.

Another case in point is that of an eminent physician who, in relating his own experience while suffering under an attack of fever attended with delirium, states that, being obliged to call in a colleague