In the olden time, the ladies of Miletus, in a fit of melancholy for the absence of their husbands and lovers, resolved to hang themselves, and vied with each other in the alacrity with which they did the deed. In the time of the Ptolemies, a stoic philosopher pleaded so eloquently, one day, to an Alexandrian audience on the advantages of suicide, that he inspired his hearers with his principles, and a great number voluntarily sacrificed their lives. A clergyman, master of a very large and popular school, the locality of which, for obvious reasons, it would not do to specify, recently informed one of his friends that he had discovered a new pupil in the act of practising a disgraceful vice. “Send him home to his parents, and say nothing about it,” was the friend’s judicious recommendation. The schoolmaster, however, placed great confidence in his own eloquence and the corrective powers of the birch. He assembled his boys, made an excellent harangue on the guilt of the delinquent, and gave him a sound flogging. The example of crime proved more influential than the example of punishment, and the vice spread so rapidly that the whole school was broken up in consequence.[39] The particulars of the following case are recorded in the “American Journal of the Medical Sciences,” by Dr. Parrish. He says, “I was called to visit a child in the family of J. S., a respectable gentleman residing in my neighbourhood. On my arrival, at 3 P.M., I found, on going into the chamber of my patient, that death had occurred. The patient was a girl in her fifteenth year, who had been carefully brought up by a family with whom she had lived between seven and eight years. She had generally enjoyed good health, with the exception of occasional attacks of sickness of the stomach, and headache. She had just passed the age of puberty, and possessed a docile disposition. Her situation in life, as far as could be ascertained, was in every respect agreeable, and congenial to her wishes. “On the morning of the day of her death, she was engaged as usual in the domestic concerns of the family until eight o’clock, when she was observed in the yard vomiting. Upon inquiring into the history of the case, I found that early in the morning on which the patient died, she had held a conversation with a little girl residing in the next house, in which she mentioned having lately read in a newspaper of a man who had been unfortunate in his business, and had taken arsenic to destroy himself; she also spoke of an apothecary’s shop near by, and said she frequently went there.