In the second half of the nineteenth century, the view that “[e]very case of melancholia should be looked upon as having a suicidal tendency” dominated among British asylum physicians. However, a generation earlier medical texts on melancholia contained only sporadic references to “suicide” and fewer still to the adjective “suicidal.” The latter emerged as a medical concept in the early nineteenth century, chiefly through the medical certificates of insanity which were required in the admission of an individual into the asylum. The recording practices surrounding these certificates were standardized following the 1845 Lunacy Acts, and the data they produced was entered alongside diagnostic categories on the pages of asylum case books.