Elephants and Epistemology: Evidence of Suicide in the Gilded Age

Evidence on the frequency of suicide in modernizing America is relatively scarce, and extant records evoke suspicions about pervasive misreporting. This essay explores death records from Massachusetts as a source for investigating suicide in the late nineteenth century. Assessments of the records indicate omissions, but the extent appears to be modest, and trends in reported suicides comport with those in the more trustworthy findings of medical examiners. The state’s death reports point to a society with an extraordinary occurrence and awareness of suicide, in which the presumed dynamics of social isolation and imitative behavior held little sway. Breadth of awareness did not, however, equate to depth: only at the nineteenth century’s end did the public seem interested in the delayed traumas of the Civil War. The essay’s findings are an invitation to pursue suicide statistics as the gateway to disparate sources of the act’s meaning.