"WITH NO MUSIC PLAYING AND NO ONE SINGING : How suicide in the Bohemian Lands came to be regarded less in criminal and more in medical terms (1787-1873)
Abstrakt
This contribution deals with the process of de-criminalization of suicide in theHabsburg Monarchy between 1787 and 1873 and its various phases. The authordraws mainly on concrete court cases from the territory of Krumau, supported byother examples from Bohemia and Moravia.
During the period in question, variouslegislative steps brought a departure from judicial sanctions with regard to body andbelongings of the deceased. In this way, the law adapted to a gradual change in real-ity, caused mainly by resistance to these sanctions among the populace, with the peo-ple seeking to reach interment on cemetery grounds or a fully-fledged Christian bur-ial.
The author convincingly demonstrates that the part of the medical expert gainedin importance since the start of Enlightenment: To seek testimony to a mental dis-order by a doctor increasingly became a method of getting around the repressingnorms of criminal law and ultimately around these of canon law, which had a longer-lasting effect.