Morbid Psychological Heredity. 125 



native city, an apology for his voluntary death, which it was not 

 thought advisable to publish, lest men should be encouraged to 

 quit a life whereof so much evil is spoken. So far there is nothing 

 extraordinary, since instances of this kind are everywhere to be 

 found ; but here is the astonishing feature of the case : 



' His father and his brother had committed suicide at the same 

 age as himself. What hidden disposition of mind, what sympathy, 

 what concurrence of physical laws, caused this father and his two 

 sons to perish by their own hand and by the same form of death, 

 just when they have attained the same year of their age?' * 



Since Voltaire's day, the history of mental disease has registered 

 a great number of similar facts. They abound in Gall, Esquirol, 

 Moreau of Tours, and in all the writers on insanity. Esquirol 

 knew a family in which the grandmother, mother, daughter, and 

 grandson committed suicide. 'A father of taciturn disposition/ 

 says Falret, ' had five sons. The eldest, at the age of forty, threw 

 himself out of a third story window; the second strangled himself 

 at the age of thirty-five ; the third threw himself out of a window ; 

 the fourth shot himself; a cousin of theirs drowned himself for a 

 trifling cause. In the Oroten family, the oldest in Teneriffe, two 

 sisters were affected with suicidal mania, and their brother, grand- 

 father, and two uncles put an end to their own lives. 2 One of the 

 most singular combinations of related suicides on record is this . 



' D , son and nephew of suicides, married a woman who was 



daughter and niece to suicides. He hanged himself, and his wife 

 married a second husband who was son, nephew, and first-cousin 

 of suicides.' 



The point which excited Voltaire's surprise, viz. the heredity of 



suicide at a definite age, has been often noticed. ' M. L , a 



monomaniac,' says Moreau of Tours, ' put an end to his life at the 

 age of thirty. His son had hardly attained the same age when he 

 was attacked with the same monomania, and made two attempts 

 at suicide. Another man, in the prime of life, fell into a melan- 

 choly state and drowned himself; his son, of good constitution, 



1 Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, Art. 'Caton.' 



2 Annales Medico-Psychologiques, 1844. Several other facts will be found in 

 Lucas, ii, 780, and in Moreau, Psychologic Morbide, 171 174. 



