Pre-Durkheim suicidology

Durkheim is generally regarded as the founder of the scientific study of suicide. However, even a cursory review of 18th- and 19th-century literature reveals an increasingly sophisticated scientific approach to suicide, culminating in the encyclopedic research of Morselli in 1879 and the critical review of Tuke in 1892, works that lose nothing in comparison with Durkheim's Le Suicide of 1897. This review, while in no way drawing Durkheim's role as a founder of scientific sociology into question, indicates that his position in regard to the study of suicide does warrant reconsideration.