Smrtni zov: Suicid kao socijalni problem u Bosni i Hercegovini krajem 19. i početkom 20. stoljeća
The Call of Death: Suicide as a Social Problem in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

Summary/Abstract: Suicide is an act in which an individual takes their own life on their own initiative. Globally, approximately 700,000 people die by suicide every year, a figure that does not include suicide attempts or those experiencing suicidal thoughts (for every completed suicide, there are an estimated 25 attempts). A suicide epidemic was also characteristic of the late 19th century, a period when this social phenomenon was frequently described in European scientific literature and public discourse as a ‘disease of our time’. Drawing on unpublished archival sources from the Sarajevo Provincial Government and the Joint Ministry of Finance, as well as the periodicals and scholarly literature of the Austro-Hungarian period, this paper aims to determine the extent to which the rising trend of suicide in European societies was also present in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Special attention is paid, as far as the sources allow, to the gender aspects of suicide, the origin of the individuals who killed themselves (rural-urban), their social profile, age, type of occupation, marital status, and health status. Determining the motives for suicide presented certain challenges; therefore, adhering once more to the limitations of the consulted sources, the method of psychological autopsy was employed. As for press reports, it should be noted that during the forty years of the Austro-Hungarian administration, a large number of daily newspapers were published, and it would be impossible to review all the suicide-related information provided by the newspapers of that time. Bearing this in mind, a random sampling method was employed; the resulting database provides a solid foundation for drawing conclusions on the various aspects of suicide as a social phenomenon.

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