Reading should not carry a health warning – Frank Furedi – Aeon: "The representation of mass reading as an ‘insidious contagion’ was often coupled with sightings of irrational destructive behaviour. The most alarming manifestation of the reading epidemic was its potential for triggering acts of self-harm, including suicide among the impressionable young. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) – a story of unrequited love leading to the act of self-destruction – was widely condemned for triggering a wave of copy-cat suicides on both sides of the Atlantic.
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