Hidden from History

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Before the nineteenth or even twentieth century a lot of what we know about suicide in England and Wales comes from the records of coroners’ inquests.  This reliance on inquests means that what we know about historic suicide is only ever part of the story and surviving documents only allow us to observe people who successfully took their own lives. It is, however, likely that many, many more people tried to kill themselves than succeeded.  In this podcast, we’ll explain how we know about suicide in the past, because it is far from straightforward to get evidence.

Image of the week: suicide from a bridge. From George Cruikshank, The Drunkard’s Children (1848).
Full Bibliographic Record: Wellcome Library Catalogue L0007446
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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