Choosing Death

Because of Geneva's uniquely rich and well-organised sources, this is the first study to provide reliable evidence on suicide rates for pre-modern Europe. Watt places his findings within a wide range of historical and sociological scholarship, and while suicide was rare through the seventeenth century, he shows that Geneva experienced an explosion in self-inflicted deaths after 1750. Quite simply, modern Geneva witnessed nothing less than the birth of modern suicide both in attitudes towards it -- thorough secularised, medicalised, and stripped of diabolical undertones -- and the frequency of it.