Lifes Preservative Against Self-Killing (Psychology Revivals) 9781315849904, 9780415730808

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Psychology Revivals

Lifes Preservative Against Self-Killing

This book, first published in 1637, was the first full-length treatise on suicide published in English. Originally published in 1988 as part of the Tavistock Classics in the History of Psychiatry series, the introduction by Michael MacDonald places the book in the context of attitudes to suicide in its day, as well as showing some of the ways that this theological book is also a study of the psychology and sociology of suicide. He discusses the evolution of the law of suicide and analyses the religious beliefs held about it at the time, before going on to look at John Sym himself and the structure of his book.

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Lifes Preservative Against Self-Killing

John Sym Edited with an introduction by Michael MacDonald

T T T T T T T

R ou tledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published in 1988 by Routledge This edition first published in 2014 by Routledge 27 Church Road, Hove, BN3 2FA Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1988 Introduction by Michael MacDonald All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. A Library of Congress record exists under ISBN: 0415006392 ISBN: 978-0-415-73080-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-84990-4 (ebk)

LIFES PRESERVATIVE AGAINST

SELF-KILLING BY

JOHN SYM Edited with an Introduction by

Michael MacDonald

ROUTLEDGE London and New York

First published 1988 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1988 Introduction by Michael MacDoJ!ald

Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Cambridge All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Sym, john Lifes preservative against self-killing -(Tavistock classics in the history of psychiatry). 1. Great Britain. Suicide, history I. Title II. MacDonald, Michael, 1945- II. Service 362.2 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Sym, john Lifes preservative against self-killing/john Sym: edited with an introduction by Michael MacDonald. p. cm.-(Tavistock classics in the history of psychiatry) Includes index. ISBN 0-415-Q0639-2 1. Suicide--England-Prevention-History-Sources. 2. Suicide-Social aspects-England-History-Sources. I. MacDonald, Michael, 1945-. II. Title. III. Series. RC569.S9451988 616.85'8445-dc 19 ISBN Q-415-Q0639-2

CONTENTS

PREFACE VII

Introduction by Michael MacDonald IX

Lifes Preservative Against Self-Killing by John Sym 1

V

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PREFACE

The Tavistock Classics in the History of Psychiatry series meets a considerable need amongst academics, practitioners, and all those who are more broadly interested in the development of psychiatry. Psychiatry as a discipline has always paid considerable heed to its own founders, its history, and emergent traditions. It is one field in which the relevance of the past to the present does not diminish. There is a high professional awareness of the history of the subject, and many aspects of this are now benefiting from fruitful dialogue with the now rapidly expanding investigations of historians and historical sociologists. Yet two factors greatly hamper our grasp of psychiatry's past. On the one hand, a considerable number of the formative texts in the rise of psychiatry are exceedingly difficult to obtain, even from libraries. As a small discipline in earlier centuries, many of the major works were published only in short runs, and many, even of the classics, have never been reprinted at all. This present series aims to overcome this problem by making available a selection of such key works. Mostly they are books originally published in the English language; in other cases where the original language was, say, French or German, we are reprinting contemporary English translations; in a few cases, we hope to present entirely new translations of classic Continental works. On the other hand, in many instances little is commonly known of the life and ideas of the authors of these texts, and their works have never been subjected to thorough analyses. Our intention in this series is to follow the model of the now defunct Dawson series of psychiatric reprints, edited and introduced by Richard Hunter VII

Preface and Ida Macalpine, now, alas, both dead, and to provide substantial scholarly introductions to each volume, based upon original research. Thus the book and its author will illuminate each other, and one will avoid the dilemma of a text isolated in an intellectual vacuum, or simply the accumulation of miscellaneous biographical data. It is our hope that this series will break new ground in the history of psychiatry, and secure a new readership for a number of illustrative works in psychiatry's rich and fascinating past.

VIII

INTRODUCTION Michael MacDonald

John Sym's Lifes Preservative Against Self-Killing was the first fulllength treatise on suicide published in English. Sym himself stresses the novelty of his work. He has, he tells us, 'met with no single, nor compleat Treatise of it', and so he has launched his book onto uncharted waters (sig. a1 V).::- Like the identical claims that adorn the beginnings of books and theses today, Sym's assertion that he is the Columbus of self-killing was, though true in the strictest sense, distinctly exaggerated. There was already a considerable body of literature that treated suicide from sharply differing points of view. Clerical writers had frequently condemned it as a sin and a crime; humanist intellectuals and imaginative writers had popularized ancient philosophies and examples that condoned it. 1 A small but growing number of medical writers - many of them, as was the custom of the day, divines first and doctors second - had also briefly discussed the subject. John Donne had already written a large and highly iconoclastic theological tract to prove that it was 'not so naturally Sin that it may never be otherwise'.2 And yet Sym was right. For despite the very large number of sermons, chapters in devotional works, essays, passages in plays, prose dialogues and poems discussing self-killing, he was the first to publish a comprehensive study of suicide. Donne's book, too controversial to print and distribute openly, remained in manuscript until after his death. That a large amount of literature, discussing the legitimacy of suicide in religious and secular terms, already existed in 1637 is crucial to understanding Sym's arguments. Lifes Preservative is a thoroughgoing condemnation of self-murder, an expression of protestant zeal, and a reaction against humanist secularism. IX

Introduction by Michael MacDonald From the first page until the last, Sym's main aim is to show that deliberate self-destruction is a heinous sin. And although he moderates his harsh attitude slightly, his position is absolutely clear. Hostility to suicide was neither new nor unusual, but it had been aroused to a new pitch by the early seventeenth century, as we shall see. Self-murder 'hath in sundry Sermons preached, and published, and in other printed Treatises, beene spoken against', the famous puritan divine William Gouge points out, a little uncharitably, in his address 'To the Christian Reader' that opens this book (unpaginated). The orthodoxy of Lifes Preservative, rather than its originality, is the chief reason why it is an important work in the history of attitudes to suicide. It is absolutely representative of the prevailing opinion of its day. Furthermore, it fused theological discourse, moral condemnation and psychological insight in a way that none of the shorter works by divines and medical writers had. To understand Lifes Preservative is to grasp precisely what suicide meant to pious Englishmen in the early seventeenth century, to see something of the now forgotten attitude of mind that interpreted behaviour and emotion in terms both of natural and supernatural forces, psychological motivations and religious meanings. 3 It is fashionable nowadays in the 'human sciences' to interpret texts in ways that defamiliarize them. It is a vogue to which the most celebrated and most controversial historian of psychiatry, Michel Foucault, contributed early and powerfully. But time has defamiliarized Lifes Preservative more effectively than the most dazzling French Prospero could have. The main business of this Introduction will therefore be to 'familiarize' the text, as it were, to situate it in the context of attitudes to suicide in its day and to point out some of the ways in which this book of theology is also a subtle study of the psychology and sociology of suicide. I shall proceed in stages from context to text. Because, by Sym's era, suicide had come to be considered a crime and a sin, the first part of the Introduction will discuss the evolution of the law of suicide and the second will analyse religious beliefs about it. Some attitudes and practices, that ran contrary to the prevailing trend toward legal and religious severity to suicide, will then be considered. The changing legal and religious context shaped the content of Sym's book, and so did the undertow of toleration that accompanied growing severity.4 I shall therefore next turn to describing Sym himself and analysing the x

Introduction by Michael MacDonald formal structure of his book, suggesting what his intentions were in writing it, explaining how and why it is organized as it is, and stating what its principal themes are. Finally, I shall analyse some of the important features of his discussion of 'direct bodily selfmurder', suicide as we usually understand the term.

The law of suicide Suicide was a terrible crime in Tudor and early Stuart England. And during Sym's lifetime it was harshly punished. Self-slaughter was a species of murder, condemned by the law, by religion and by folklore. 'For the heinousnesse thereof', observed Michael Dalton in a standard legal handbook, 'it is an offence against God, against the king, and against Nature,.5 People who killed themselves were tried posthumously by a coroner's jury, and if they were found to have committed suicide when they were sane, the jury returned a verdict of felo de se (felon of himself). The suicide's goods, leases and loans were forfeited to the crown or the holder of a royal patent. His body was turned over to parish churchwardens and interred profanely, denied the usual rites of Christian burial. Old popular customs that expressed a profound horror of the act of selfmurder governed the disposal of the body, which was buried at night in a public highway, tossed face down in the grave and pinioned there with a wooden stake. These savage punishments expressed profound abhorrence at self-destruction. They had originated long before Henry Tudor took the throne in 1485, and they were not formally abolished until the nineteenth century. But this perdurable continuity in the laws and customs penalizing suicide disguises striking changes in attitudes and responses to it. The punishment.s for self-murder were seldom enforced before 1500, and they gradually fell into disuse after 1660. The era of greatest severity toward self-murder, during which Sym lived and wrote, was the product of concatenated political and religious changes. His book both epitomized the results of those changes and helped to advance them. Punishment for suicide was not new in the sixteenth century, nor was it unique to England. Similar laws and customs existed in many parts of Europe. Both the forfeiture provisions of the law and the Xl

Introduction by Michael MacDonald rites of desecration had their origins in the ancient world. By the early Middle Ages most western governments seem to have adopted forfeiture as a means of punishing suicide. 6 In England the common law condemned suicide as self-murder by the time of Bracton, in the thirteenth century. Bracton himself articulates the distinction between [elo de se and non compos mentis. 7 Felo de se verdicts were occasionally returned in the thirteenth century, and by the end of the fourteenth the crown had realized that they could yield windfalls that were an attractive kind of patronage. Richard II gave part of the property of a number of suicides to courtiers, and like other medieval monarchs he also granted away the rights to the goods of felons of themselves to noblemen and lesser landlords. 8 The rituals that were used to desecrate the bodies of suicides were based on early, pre-Christian religions. Their symbolism varied greatly from region to region in Europe, and they were only belatedly sanctioned by the Church. The canon law merely forbade suicides the normal rites of Christian burial; the civil law embraced the forms of punishments, used in parts of France and Germany, at a later date, sometime in the late Middle Ages. 9 In England the Council of Hertford adopted a canon denying suicides normal funerals and burials in 672, and a canon of King Edgar reiterated the prohibition and exempted madmen in 967. After that, the English Church was silent on the subject of suicide until 1662, when a rubric forbidding ministers to read the burial service over'such as have laid violent hands upon themselves' was at last included in the Book of Common Prayer. 10 No ecclesiastical legislation - in England or elsewhere - stipulated the forms of burial to be used to punish selfmurderers. The rites of desecration were genuine popular customs, accepted by the Church and the State as an essential part of punishing suicide but not enjoined by either institution. They expressed a deep fear of and hostility to suicide. The monarchy thus realized it had a financial interest in the enforcement of the law of suicide in the Middle Ages, and the Church sanctioned popular rituals that expressed a deep abhorrence for self-destruction. And yet [elo de se verdicts were very rare in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The crown challenged the verdicts of coroners from time to time, but supervision of their activities in this sphere of their duties seems to have been rather lax. Furthermore, coroners were unpaid and easily corruptible. 11 XII

Introduction by Michael MacDonald Enforcement of the law of suicide was thus largely left up to local officials and local communities. Barbara Hanawalt has argued convincingly that many suicides were concealed as accidents. 'Community feeling', she concludes, 'would [have been] with the surviving family' .12 Take but one example. Although the crown later proved that a Bedfordshire man who drowned in a well in April 1278 had been a suicide, a jury from the four townships around where he died returned a verdict of misadventure and concealed his goods. 13 Medieval juries were also more willing to return verdicts of non compos mentis than their Tudor and Stuart successors. Even when they did not return verdicts that .were bogus or favourable to the deceased and his survivors, medieval juries seem often to have undervalued the goods of suicides, like those of other felons. It would not be going too far, I think, to say that the law of suicide was enforced only when it was unavoidable. All that changed in the half-century after 1500. The law was enforced with increasing rigour, and the result was a massive increase in the numbers of suicides reported to the central government. The shift from locally-based leniency to centrally-directed severity was one small facet of the Tudor 'revolution in government', the administrative reforms undertaken to strengthen the crown in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Reform of the law of suicide began soon after the battle of Bosworth Field. In 1487 Henry VII passed a statute ordering coroners to hold inquests on every violent and suspicious death in the realm and establishing a regular procedure for supervising their work. Coroners were supposed to hand in all of their inquisitions at semi-annual meetings of the assizes, and they were forwarded to King's Bench, the premier criminal court, where they were reviewed by officials, who made sure that property forfeited to the crown was turned over to the king's almoner or his deputies. This ordinance was finely tuned with a writ and a second statute in 1509 and 1510 that clarified the duties and pay of coroners. Soon after these reforms the number of suicides reported to the court of King's Bench began to climb. 14 The keystone of the Tudor system of enforcing the law of suicide was put in place in the late 1530s or early 1540s. At that time a protege of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's great reforming minister, established the king's almoner's right to sue for concealed goods in the court of Star Chamber. The Privy Council sitting in Xl11

Introduction by Michael MacDonald judicial session, Star Chamber was probably the most prestigious tribunal in the land. It dealt out justice swiftly, and although the penalties it could exact for evading the law of suicide were usually not in themselves crushing, the court was an intimidating weapon. Unlike most other Tudor law reforms, which typically substituted prerogative courts for common law courts, this reform resulted in a complementary, and far more efficient jurisdiction. Routine supervision of coroners was handled by King's Bench, and so were the routine sorts of evasion. More complicated cases - or ones that escaped the vigilance of King's Bench - were tried in Star Chamber, where the almoner could expect a much faster and less complex prosecution of his cause. By about 1540, therefore, the two most prestigious courts in the land were working in tandem to enforce the law of suicide. 15 The man apparently responsible for establishing the almoner as a privileged prosecutor in Star Chamber, Nicholas Heath, was a moderate reformer in religion during Cromwell's lifetime, who reverted to conservatism and later catholicism. Almoner from 1539-47, he was on the Privy Council in the reign of Mary I and had a hand in reorganizing the business of Star Chamber. This probably explains why there was no slackening in the activities of Star Chamber in this area throughout the 1540s and 1550s. 16

The results of these reforms were spectacular. Between 1500 and 1560, the number of felo de se verdicts returned to King's Bench rose rapidly, far outpacing the growth of the population. After 1560 a kind of jagged plateau was reached, in which yearly and decennial totals of suicides jumped up and down, until 1630 or so, when reported suicides began to fall. 17 Because the statistics are so difficult to interpret, incomplete in ways that cannot be accounted for, it is impossible to confirm or refute the truth of Sym's assertion that he was living through an epidemic of suicides. What is irrefutable is that reported suicides had risen sharply in the century or so before Lifes Preservative was written 18 (see Figure 1). The law was enforced with a rigour that went far beyond mere compliance. Juries returned verdicts of felo de se when it was impossible to prove with certainty that a suicide had occurred. A great many suicides, for instance, chose to drown themselves. And frequently no one saw them go to their watery graves. Sixteenth and seventeenth century suicides seldom left notes - the odds are that the vast majority of them were illiterate - and physical evidence of XIV

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