Hanged Bodies and Melancholic Minds

This article analyses some major developments in the forensic investigation of suicide in early modern Flanders by focussing on the two main roles that medical practitioners played in suicide proceedings. First, they were asked to examine the corpses of alleged suicides in order to establish the actual cause of death and possibly unmask murders that were staged as suicides by hanging — a much-debated topic in the early modern medico-legal literature. Second, physicians and surgeons were increasingly required to attest to the mental state of suicides prior to their death, and in this way they underpinned the growing judicial leniency that eventually culminated in the official decriminalisation of suicide in 1782. Although medical evidence of insanity was frequently employed in eighteenth-century suicide trials, it never became a routine feature of all Flemish suicide proceedings. Medical practitioners only testified regarding this matter if they possessed personal knowledge of a suicide’s mental condition sufficient for giving a proper opinion as to his or her purported madness. Hence, while Flemish physicians and surgeons generally linked suicide to mental derangement, they were not the major driving force behind the final decriminalisation of self-murder.