Suicide Past and Present: A Note on Jean Pierre Falret

ABSTRACT: In 1822 Dr. Jean Pierre Falret published, in French, a scholarly work on suicide. He reported on the number of suicides in the city of Paris and its environs, on the kind of people who become suicidal, and on the treatments, both physical and psychological, that were used for these patients. In this paper, Falret's book is examined for similarities and differences of approaches to the problem of suicide in nineteenth-century France and in the current scene.