By the late nineteenth century in Europe, hanging and poisons were by far the most common ways to kill oneself in France, England, and Prussia; drowning was next in preference. Cultural differences, however, were significant. Firearms, for example, were quite commonly used in suicides in Italy, France, and Prussia but far less often in England, where a wide assortment of drugs and poisons—prussic acid, caustic acid, mercury, opium, laudanum, potassium cyanide, arsenic, vermin killers, chloroform, strychnine, and belladonna—was put to use