learn, from the
newspapers, that scores of other unhappy people are daily escaping from
their troubles through the always open door of suicide, when familiarity
with the idea of self-destruction deprives the act of all its natural
terror, it is not at all surprising that they yield to what seems to be
the general current of their social environment. I have, in my own
collection of material, a surprisingly large number of cases in which
the suicidal act may be traced directly to newspaper publicity and
imitation; but I must limit myself to a single striking
illustration--the suicidal epidemic in Emporia, Kansas, in the summer of
1901. As a result, apparently, of the publication of the details of two
or three suicides of people prominent in that little Kansas town, there
broke out an epidemic of self-destruction which culminated in the
sunny, flowery month of June, and which carried the annual suicide rate
from about 90 per million to 1,665 per million--a rate five times
greater than that of Saxony. Mr. Morse, the mayor of the city, consulted
the Board of Health, and decided to stop the publication of the details
of suicides in the local papers, even if it should require the
employment of force. He issued a proclamation, on the 16th of June, in
which he said: "I have consulted the Board of Health, and if the Emporia
papers do not comply with my request, I shall have a right to stop, and
I will stop summarily, the publication of these suicide details, under
the law providing for the suppression of epidemics. There is clearly an
epidemic in this city, and although it is mental, it is none the less
deadly. Its contagion may be clearly shown to come from what is known in
medicine as the psychic suggestion, found in the publication of the
details of suicides. If the paper on which the local journals are
printed had been kept in a place infected with small-pox, I could demand
that the journals stop using that paper, or stop publication. If they
spread another contagion--the contagious suggestion of suicide--I
believe the liberty of the press is not to be considered before the
public welfare, and that the courts would sustain me in using force to
prevent the publication of newspapers containing matter clearly
deleterious to the public health."

I believe that the reasoning of Mayor Morse is perfectly sound, and that
the position taken by him is absolutely impregnable. The prevention of
the publication of suicides in the newspap