This article examines the “suicide craze” in late 19th-century Greece & explores the ways in which anxieties about self-destruction were linked to concerns about the dramatic rise in homicide & to more general debates about the health of the nation. The argument is put that in Greece, preoccupations with the nation’s healthy embodiment were inseparable from a disquiet about the nation’s potential disintegration. Greece provides a useful case study for shedding light on the manner in which a discourse of health & progress presupposes one of sickness & regression. (59 refs.)