Eva Yampolsky

"Climate and seasonality as factors of suicidality in 19th-century French psychiatric discourse"

Eva Yampolsky est collaboratrice scientifique à l'université de Genève. Elle travaille depuis plusieurs années sur l'histoire de la folie aux époques moderne et contemporaine, en articulant l'histoire de la médecine et l'histoire du religieux. Elle a récemment publié La folie du suicide. La mort volontaire comme objet médical en France au 19e siècle (BHMS, 2023).

Eva Yampolsky is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Geneva. Her research focuses on the history of madness in early modern and contemporary periods, articulating the history of medicine and religion studies. She will soon publish an English translation of her book La folie du suicide. La mort volontaire comme objet médical en France au 19e siècle (BHMS, 2023).

Abstract:

The climate and seasonality are often cited by 19th-century French alienists as significant causes of suicidality, mental illness and criminality. While this view is part of a medical tradition that has its roots in the humoral theory of the Antiquity and the much later influence of hydrotherapy, alienists and other physicians working in public hygiene inscribe these factors within a larger anthropological project seeking to explain and to act upon psychological and behavioral factors governing individuals within a given society. On the basis of 19th-century medical treatises by physicians and alienists such as Alexandre Brierre de Boismont, Émile Le Roy and Armand Corre, this conference will examine the role that climatic factors played in early psychiatric theories of suicidality, as a way to develop a new anthropological vision of society. Within this context that anchored medical discourse on civilization, climate is seen both as a pathogenic factor, dependent on social and cultural differences, and as having a preventive or therapeutic function in response to social and racial determinants, but also to political and economic influences. Going far beyond their early influences of balancing the humors or predispositions, 19th-century psychiatric theories on the influence of climate on suicide are part of a larger political project of social science.