The curse and the gift of modernity in late nineteenth-century suicide discourse in Finland

‘In greater nations, where large numbers of people create complicated social situations, where one can find plenty of riches, a lot of suffering, and high intelligence but also many degenerated individuals, the battle against self-murder can at times seem hopeless, and the onlooker is lead to believe it’s all caused by grim determinism’. This is how the Finnish physician Fredrik Wilhelm Westerlund (1844–1921) summarised the late nineteenth-century suicide discourse in April 1897. Observing the European debate on suicide from the north-eastern corner of Europe, the geographical distance and especially socio-economic remoteness between Finland and the leading countries of modernisation presented Westerlund with a bird’s eye view of the burning question of the connection between suicide and industrialisation, urbanisation, and modern society. Westerlund, like his contemporaries, acknowledged that suicide – the most repugnant of sins for over a thousand years – was a disease brought about by progress, a dark stain that signified a modern society. In this chapter, I explore how suicide as a sign of modernity was interpreted in a country where the material side of modernity – big cities and railroads – were rarely seen by the majority of the population. The relationship between suicide discourse and modernisation has been a recurring subject in the historiography of suicide since at least the 1980s. The historian Howard Kusher has described in his book SelfDestruction in the Promised Land and subsequent articles how ‘the fear of modernity’ was reflected in how suicide was conceptualised in the