It should be noted that 75 per cent of the 106 suicides examined here were carried out by men, and male anxieties about declining occupational abilities were extremely significant. 54 Differences in late-life occupational stresses do not account for all of the gender disparity—it seems, for one thing, that men potentially chose more lethal methods of suicide—but they are an important part of the story. 55 Worries about declining employability, expressed partly through ideas about ‘lameness’, were present in the case of Isaac Hendley, ‘an elderly Man between Sixty and Seventy years of age’ who cut his throat in Shoreditch in 1797.
1
—
—