I heard it on the Science channell, Vater effect,(incorrectly spelled) Vater was a german author, wrote a book

Question

Vater effect,(incorrectly spelled) Vater was a german author, wrote a book, and then commited suicide,....soon his book was published, those who read it it, too killed themselves, so they banned any more printing of that book. The years were perhaps those in the 1800"s or late 1700"s.
The title of that book was what drove me here today,... all I can hand you is words that sound like that title of the book. "Thesaurous of vater" uhm,.. something like that. But in modern times we have a word for when some one (blank) then commits suicide, perhaps by influence I don"t know, and we call it the "Vater" (misspelled) effect. Thank you for your help

Answer 1

Took me a while, but now I think I know what you misheard:

An explanation of "suicide epidemics" is the imitation theory or the so-called Werther effect, initially introduced by the sociologist David P. Phillips in 1974.
Here are two websites about it:
http://www.med.uio.no/ssff/engelsk/menuyouth/Ystgaard.htm
http://www.sdreader.com/php/cover.php?mode=article&showpg=1&id=20050331

And there's no "Vater" behind it (that's a German surname, but much more frequently the German word for "father"), but "Werther", the hero of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's famous novel "Die Leiden des jungen Werthers" (1774, English title "The Sorrows of Young Werther") which led to the first known series of copycat suicides.

So both "Vater" and "thesauros" are mondegreens - for another 10 pts I'll tell you what "mondegreens" are ;-)