Suicide

P: In Brooklyn last week Morton Kanner, 13, ill, hanged himself from a light fixture with a towel, because he read of another sick boy doing so.

P: Also in Brooklyn, Julius Marshall, 26, wrote a note: ''With my last breath I curse Mrs. E. Holtz and her daughter, Marie. May the misery that has been mine be theirs as long as they live." Then he turned on the gas jets, died. Mrs. Holtz operates the Brooklyn blood donors' exchange. Marshall courted her daughter, learned to sell his blood, sold so frequently that he grew too weak to hunt other work.

P: In Newark, N. J., Concetta Mazzalla, 16, punished for staying out late, piled comfortable pillows on the living room floor, turned on seven gas jets, lay down. Her fox terrier aroused the family in time. They gave Concetta a thrashing.

Suicide is committed at a rate of about 336 cases per week in the U. S. Last week Dr. Frederick Ludwig Hoffman, consulting statistician of Prudential Insurance Co. of America, printed a survey in the Spectator, insurancemen's magazine, of 45,000 cases of suicide effected or attempted in the U. S. last year.

Sacramento, Calif., had the highest suicide rate (52.8 per 100,000). Next came San Diego (51.8), San Francisco (39.3), Atlantic City (36.6), Quincy, Ill.,. (32.7). New York City (counting its five boroughs) had 1,255 suicides (rate, 20.9). The nation's rate was 18 per 100,000, slightly higher than 1928's 17.5. Last autumn's stockmarket crash was a cause of increase, but (observes Dr. Hoffman) "not as marked as might have been expected." But whatever the immediate cause of self-destruction, it is merely the detonation of a muddled mental state, whose cure lies often within the physician's power.

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