Vermont Telegraph

SUICIDAL SYMPATHY.—A late number of the "American Journal of Medical Science," contains a long and very interesting statement from Dr. Isaac Parish, detailing the circumstances which led, or are believed to have led, a young girl of 14 to commit suicide by poison. Her health was reasonably good, her situation in life agreeable, and her disposition was habitually cheerful; yet without any apparent motive or inducement, she procured and swallowed arsenic, the effect of which was death. It was subsequently ascertained, however, that she had read in a newspaper an account of a man destroying himself by arsenic, and that on the morning of her death, before she took the fatal potion, she had conversed upon the subject with a girl in the adjoining house; and it was recollected that some months before, a person residing in the same house with herself had attempted suicide by laudanum. The conclusion at which Dr. Parish has arrived is, that the child was instigated to the fatal act solely by the diseased working of imagination, and that inexplicable sympathy which is sometimes known to impel the mind to the encounter of what it dreads. We quote the last two paragraphs of the article, for the sake of the warning they convey.—N.Y. Spec.

This case is stated as affording strong testimony in favor of a principle, which is now beginning to attract the attention of medical men, viz: that the publicity which is given to cases of suicide, in the newspapers, and by other means—forms one of the strongest incentive to the commission of the act, in those who have a secret disposition to destroy themselves. If this be the fact, a high responsibility rests upon physicians, so to influence public opinion, and more especially editors, as to prevent the narration of the circumstances connected with deaths of this unfortunate class. No good can certainly arise from the exposure of facts which ought to remain in the bosom of the distressed families, while, there is reason to believe, the list of victims to suicide is annually very much swelled from the course which is now so generally pursued."