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The concept that some people can die on purpose or can commit, so to say, psychic suicide has claimed my interest for many years. I have read six papers on the subject, 1 and have gathered a large mass of material of its manifold ramifications, but owing to the limited space at my disposal, I shall here give only a very short abstract of my material and a brief analysis of one of my cases.
I am convinced that the same forces which lead to ordinary suicide can impel some people to die without the need of resorting to any physical agency. Somehow, some people can make up their minds to die, and just die. Explorers and anthropologists, beginning with Spencer and Gillen, have been telling us that primitive people die if they know that they have violated a taboo, offended a sorcerer, injured a Kato-tree, entered a death house, or if a charmed stick or bone has been pointed at them. I could quote numerous authoritative statements from well-known observers, who have witnessed this strange phenomenon among semi-enlightened and primitive races the world over. All of them state that those aborigines, no matter in what part of the world, once they make up their minds to die, can rarely be saved. This is also confirmed by reliable physicians who have been trained in the latest technique of medicine and surgery, who thoroughly examined such cases soon after they felt that they were doomed, and after they died. There was nothing physical that postmortem examinations could reveal to account for such deaths. I was assured of these facts by Drs. Arnold and Straub, who had practised medicine and surgery respectively in Honolulu for many years.
But long before I received these medical corroborations, I was