Timeline: Self-Mutilation in History

496-406 BCE
Sophocles, Ancient Greece
In Sophocles's play, Oedipus unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother, Jocasta. After Jocasta kills herself, Oedipus blinds himself by sticking her golden brooches through his eyes while crying,"Wicked, wicked eyes! You shall not see me nor my shame- Not see my present crime. Go dark, for all time blind to what you should have never seen"

460-370 BCE
Hippocrates
Hippocrates's humor theory asserted that one could be "rebalanced by bloodletting, blistering, purging by vomiting or anal purgatives, or other potions that would cleanse the body."

200 BCE-200 CE
During the Epic Period in India, Hindu mythology developed. In one myth, Soordas, a devotee of Lord Krishna, saw Lord Krishna, and, in order to preserve the wonderful sight in his mind, he enucleated both his eyes. Soordas literally means "blind disciple."

First Century BCE
The story of Cybele and Attis was portrayed by the Roman poet Catullus. After having been unfaithful to Cybele, he "Lopped off the load of his loins with a sharp flint." This example was followed by priests and other devotees in the Day of Blood festival to honor Attis, March 24.

2nd-4th Century CE
Mark 9:47-48: "If your eye is your downfall, tear it out! Better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to be thrown with both eyes into Gehenna, where the worm dies not and the fire is never extinguished."
Matthew 6:22-23: "What I say to you is: anyone who looks lustfully at a woman has already committed adultery with her in his thoughts. If your right eye is your trouble, gouge it out and throw it away! Better to lose part of your body than to have it all cast into Gehenna."

11th Century
Self-mutilation as an expression of the Christian faith was practiced by "flagellant Christian cults from the eleventh century on (Favazza 1987), numerous nuns and saints of the Middle Ages who were known to starve purge, flagellate, and scar themselves (Bell 1985), and even in the self-flagellation of today's Roman Catholic Opus Dei movement."

Circa 1300
In Marco Polo's Travels, he describes how the Calif of Baghdad threatened Christians, demanding they move a mountain by faith, or else die if they would not convert to Islam. A one-eyed Christian Cobbler who had heeded Matthew's text saved them. Marco Polo commented, "By this act you can judge the excellence of his Faith."

1846
The first case report on self-mutilation was published. It describes a guilt-ridden widow who enucleated both of her eyes.

1886
An African Bushman family was exhibited in Berlin. Four of the six family members had one or more fingertips amputated. Virchow made drawings of their hands and noted that "in every sickness of what kind soever it is usual with them to take off extreme joints of the fingers, beginning with the little finger of the left hand." Finger amputations have also been connected with African tribal mourning. The extent of the amputation (how much of the finger was removed) would indicate the closeness of the amputee's relationship with the deceased.

1888
Artist Vincent van Gogh, angry with a housemate, cut off his earlobe and sent it to a prostitute named Rachel. It has been asserted that she held significance because of her name, evoking the biblical figure who "grieved for her children". Van Gogh "may have wanted her to grieve for and to love him."

1920
Freud's proposed life and death instincts: "In Freud's theory of the death instinct, the person withdraws from human connections and retreats into a narcissistic position, silently driving him or herself toward death. Freud emphasized that it was only through the activity of the life instinct that this death-like force was projected outward as destructive impulses to objects in the outside world."

1938
Karl Menninger suggested that self -mutilation might be an effort to heal oneself. He wrote, "Local self-destruction is a form of partial suicide to avert total suicide." Menninger also classified the behavior into four categories: neurotic, psychotic, organic, and religious.

1960s
Traditional scarification among the Bangwa tribe in Africa ceased. It had been long practiced to enhance beauty and indicate social status. It also had medical purposes. A star cut on the skin over the liver would prevent hepatic disease, and cuts all over the body would free oneself from spirits.

1983
Modern psychiatric interest in self-mutilation was marked by a 1983 paper by Pattison and Kahan. Using 56 published reports, Pattison and Kahan classified self-mutilation on the basis of lethality, method, and repetition, constructing a chart in which all self-damaging behaviors could be classified.

1990
The most widely accepted classification of self-mutilation was constructed by Favazza and Rosenthal, presented in the book, Bodies Under Siege (1996)