History of suicide

Pythagoras, for example, was against the act, though more on mathematical than moral grounds, believing that there was only a finite number of souls for use in the world, and that the sudden and unexpected departure of one would upset a delicate balance.

For the Stoics, a philosophical sect which originated in Greece, death was a guarantee of personal freedom, an escape from an unbearable reality that had nothing left to give.

Attitudes towards suicide slowly began to shift during the Renaissance; Thomas More the English humanist, wrote in Utopia (1516) that a person afflicted with disease can "free himself from this bitter life…since by death he will put an end not to enjoyment but to torture...it will be a pious and holy action".

However assisted suicide and killing oneself for other reasons were still considered a crime for people in his Utopia, punished by the denial of funerary rites.

[8] A criminal ordinance issued by Louis XIV of France in 1670 was far more severe in its punishment: the dead person's body was drawn through the streets, face down, and then hung or thrown on a garbage heap.

[9][10] In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, loopholes were invented to avoid the damnation that was promised by most Christian doctrine as a penalty of suicide.

[11] The secularization of society that began during The Enlightenment questioned traditional religious attitudes toward suicide to eventually form the modern perspective on the issue.

[citation needed] In ancient times, suicide sometimes followed defeat in battle, to avoid capture and possible subsequent torture, mutilation, or enslavement by the enemy.

[citation needed] Slave suicide in the United States before the American Civil War has been seen as a social protest.

Some slaves were portrayed by abolitionist writers, such as William Lloyd Garrison, as those that ended their lives in response to the hypocrisy of the American Constitution.

[21] In the 1960s, Buddhist monks, most notably Thích Quảng Đức, in South Vietnam gained Western praise in their protests against President Ngô Đình Diệm by burning themselves to death.

Similar events were reported in central Europe, such as Jan Palach and Ryszard Siwiec following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.

[citation needed] Eliyahu Rips, who studied mathematics in the Latvian University, on April 13, 1969 attempted self-immolation at the Freedom Monument in Riga in order to protest against the Soviet military invasion of Czechoslovakia.