Dr. J. G. Davey read an essay before the Bath and Bristol Branch of the British Medical Association a few years back, in which he proved to his own satisfaction that “suicide is at all times, and under all circumstances, the effect of a positive brain disease;” but his arguments fail to explain the cases where two persons commit the act together; are we to suppose such disease of brain to be contagious? He mentions such a case, but without explanation. See Asylum Journal of Mental Science, vol. vii. 108, and xvi. 406. It may be only a coincidence, but it is a fact, that almost without exception the supporters of the theory that all suicides are insane have been medical attendants in asylums. Closely connected with unsoundness of mind is the disease epilepsy and its consequences; as is well known, the less violent forms, those in which the convulsive seizures are less obvious, are more liable to end in mental impairment, and thence in suicide, than are the more well-developed cases of convulsion. And among the modes of exhibiting its effects, it must not be forgotten that epilepsy is in some cases apt to show itself, not in a physical spasm but in a nerve storm, burst of passion, and what not: compare the opinion of Trousseau, in “L’Union Medicale,” 1861; he says: “It may even safely be asserted that if a man who has presented no previous mental disturbance, or any sign of lunacy or furor, is not under the influence of alcohol, or any other drug, commit murder or suicide, he is epileptic, and has suffered a complete paroxysm, or has had epileptic vertigo.” This very sweeping assertion does not commend itself to me, nor is it, so far as I can ascertain, generally accepted as reliable; it is too far reaching and dogmatic; it is one thing to believe epilepsy may be revealed by a burst of violence, and quite another thing to decide that every act of sudden passion is epilepsy, _i.e._, disease, and therefore blameless. Blandford, in his work on “Insanity,” states: “That sane people commit suicide is a fact that must be apparent to every one who exercises _common sense_ in looking upon the subject. The hundreds of poor persons who are brought to our hospitals, half drowned, or with throats half cut, are _not insane_ in any medical sense of the word. Of course there are insane persons who are suicidal.” M. Leuret epigrammatically sums up the causes of self-murder in the three words, madness, want, and crime. The “Lancet,” in the autumn of last year, in an editorial article, remarked: “Without hair-splitting, the great majority of suicides are perfectly well aware of the nature of the act they are performing, and do a deed with a so far intelligent purpose of escaping from a misery which seems unendurable, or because of some terror or shame that for the time overwhelms. “It is heart-breaking and brain-tearing trouble that causes it, in the (hope or) belief that dying is sleep, or eternal oblivion.”