Explanations for death by suicide in northern Britain during the long eighteenth century.

ABSTRACT

This article uses coroners' inquest findings, media such as newspapers, magazines, pamphlets and broadsides, and family correspondence (all drawn from Scotland and the north of England) as well as civil and criminal court records and medical and legal writings from both countries to explore perceptions of the link between state of mind and self-inflicted death. It asks how doctors, lawyers, families and 'society' at large conceptualized, responded to and coped with suicide, questioning the extent to which it became medicalized i.e. consistently linked with mental pathology. The aim is to square the apparently clear-cut, but very different understandings of doctors and lawyers on the one hand and coroners' inquests on the other with the more emotionally charged and morally complex ways those both close to and distant from attempted or successful suicides related to their situation.