The Opium Habit E-Book

Horace B. Day

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 489

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

This volume has been compiled chiefly for the benefit of opium-eaters. Its subject is one indeed which might be made alike attractive to medical men who have a fancy for books that are professional only in an accidental way; to general readers who would like to see gathered into a single volume the scattered records of the consequences attendant upon the indulgence of a pernicious habit; and to moralists and philanthropists to whom its sad stories of infirmity and suffering might be suggestive of new themes and new objects upon which to bestow their reflections or their sympathies. But for none of these classes of readers has the book been prepared. In strictness of language little medical information is communicated by it. Incidentally, indeed, facts are stated which a thoughtful physician may easily turn to professional account. The literary man will naturally feel how much more attractive the book might have been made had these separate and sometimes disjoined threads of mournful personal histories been woven into a more coherent whole; but the book has not been made for literary men. The philanthropist, whether a theoretical or a practical one, will find in its pages little preaching after his particular vein, either upon the vice or the danger of opium-eating. Possibly, as he peruses these various records, he may do much preaching for himself, but he will not find a great deal furnished to his hand, always excepting the rather inopportune reflections of Mr. Joseph Cottle over the case of his unhappy friend Coleridge. The book has been compiled for opium-eaters, and to their notice it is urgently commended.

Leseprobe

The Opium Habit

The Opium HabitINTRODUCTION.THE OPIUM HABIT.DE QUINCEY'S "CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER."OPIUM REMINISCENCES OF COLERIDGE.WILLIAM BLAIR.OPIUM AND ALCOHOL COMPARED.INSANITY AND SUICIDE FROM AN ATTEMPT TO ABANDON MORPHINE.A MORPHINE HABIT OVERCOME.ROBERT HALL—JOHN RANDOLPH—WM. WILBERFORCE,WHAT SHALL THEY DO TO BE SAVED?OUTLINES OF THE OPIUM-CURE.NotesCopyright

The Opium Habit

Horace B. Day

INTRODUCTION.

This volume has been compiled chiefly for the benefit of opium-eaters. Its subject is one indeed which might be made alike attractive to medical men who have a fancy for books that are professional only in an accidental way; to general readers who would like to see gathered into a single volume the scattered records of the consequences attendant upon the indulgence of a pernicious habit; and to moralists and philanthropists to whom its sad stories of infirmity and suffering might be suggestive of new themes and new objects upon which to bestow their reflections or their sympathies. But for none of these classes of readers has the book been prepared. In strictness of language little medical information is communicated by it. Incidentally, indeed, facts are stated which a thoughtful physician may easily turn to professional account. The literary man will naturally feel how much more attractive the book might have been made had these separate and sometimes disjoined threads of mournful personal histories been woven into a more coherent whole; but the book has not been made for literary men. The philanthropist, whether a theoretical or a practical one, will find in its pages little preaching after his particular vein, either upon the vice or the danger of opium-eating. Possibly, as he peruses these various records, he may do much preaching for himself, but he will not find a great deal furnished to his hand, always excepting the rather inopportune reflections of Mr. Joseph Cottle over the case of his unhappy friend Coleridge. The book has been compiled for opium-eaters, and to their notice it is urgently commended. Sufferers from protracted and apparently hopeless disorders profit little by scientific information as to the nature of their complaints, yet they listen with profound interest to the experience of fellow-sufferers, even when this experience is unprofessionally and unconnectedly told. Medical empirics understand this and profit by it. In place of the general statements of the educated practitioner of medicine, the empiric encourages the drooping hopes of his patient by narrating in detail the minute particulars of analagous cases in which his skill has brought relief.Before the victim of opium-eating is prepared for the services of an intelligent physician he requires some stimulus to rouse him to the possibility of recovery. It is not thedictaof the medical man, but the experience of the relieved patient, that the opium-eater, desiring—nobody but he knows how ardently—to enter again into the world of hope, needs, to quicken his paralyzed will in the direction of one tremendous effort for escape from the thick night that blackens around him. The confirmed opium-eater is habitually hopeless. His attempts at reformation have been repeated again and again; his failures have been as frequent as his attempts. He sees nothing before him but irremediable ruin. Under such circumstances of helpless depression, the following narratives from fellow-sufferers and fellow-victims will appeal to whatever remains of his hopeful nature, with the assurance that others who have suffered even as he has suffered, and who have struggled as he has struggled, and have failed again and again as he has failed, have at length escaped the destruction which in his own case he has regarded as inevitable.The number of confirmed opium-eaters in the United States is large, not less, judging from the testimony of druggists in all parts of the country as well as from other sources, than eighty to a hundred thousand. The reader may ask who make up this unfortunate class, and under what circumstances did they become enthralled by such a habit? Neither the business nor the laboring classes of the country contribute very largely to the number. Professional and literary men, persons suffering from protracted nervous disorders, women obliged by their necessities to work beyond their strength, prostitutes, and, in brief, all classes whose business or whose vices make special demands upon the nervous system, are those who for the most part compose the fraternity of opium-eaters. The events of the last few years have unquestionably added greatly to their number. Maimed and shattered survivors from a hundred battle-fields, diseased and disabled soldiers released from hostile prisons, anguished and hopeless wives and mothers, made so by the slaughter of those who were dearest to them, have found, many of them, temporary relief from their sufferings in opium.There are two temperaments in respect to this drug. With persons whom opium violently constricts, or in whom it excites nausea, there is little danger that its use will degenerate into a habit. Those, however, over whose nerves it spreads only a delightful calm, whose feelings it tranquillizes, and in whom it produces an habitual state of reverie, are those who should be upon their guard lest the drug to which in suffering they owe so much should become in time the direst of curses. Persons of the first description need little caution, for they are rarely injured by opium. Those of the latter class, who have already become enslaved by the habit, will find many things in these pages that are in harmony with their own experience; other things they will doubtless find of which they have had no experience. Many of the particular effects of opium differ according to the different constitutions of those who use it. In De Quincey it exhibited its power in gorgeous dreams in consequence of some special tendency in that direction in De Quincey's temperament, and not because dreaming is by any means an invariable attendant upon opium-eating. Different races also seem to be differently affected by its use. It seldom, perhaps never, intoxicates the European; it seems habitually to intoxicate the Oriental. It does not generally distort the person of the English or American opium-eater; in the East it is represented as frequently producing this effect.It is doubtful whether a sufficient number of cases of excess in opium-eating or of recovery from the habit have yet been recorded, or whether such as have been recorded have been so collated as to warrant a positive statement as to all the phenomena attendant upon its use or its abandonment. A competent medical man, uniting a thorough knowledge of his profession with educated habits of generalizing specific facts under such laws—affecting the nervous, digestive, or secretory system—as are recognized by medical science, might render good service to humanity by teaching us properly to discriminate in such cases between what is uniform and what is accidental. In the absence, however, of such instruction, these imperfect, and in some cases fragmentary, records of the experience of opium-eaters are given, chiefly in the language of the sufferers themselves, that the opium-eating reader may compare case with case, and deduce from such comparison the lesson of the entire practicability of his own release from what has been the burden and the curse of his existence. The entire object of the compilation will have been attained, if the narratives given in these pages shall be found to serve the double purpose of indicating to the beginner in opium-eating the hazardous path he is treading, and of awakening in the confirmed victim of the habit the hope that he may be released from the frightful thraldom which has so long held him, infirm in body, imbecile in will, despairing in the present, and full of direful foreboding for the future.In giving the subjoined narratives of the experience of opium-eaters, the compiler has been sorely tempted to weave them into a more coherent and connected story; but he has been restrained by the conviction that the thousands of opium-eaters, whose relief has been his main object in preparing the volume, will be more benefited by allowing each sufferer to tell his own story than by any attempt on his part to generalize the multifarious and often discordant phenomena attendant upon the disuse of opium. As yet the medical profession are by no means agreed as to the character or proper treatment of the opium disease. While medical science remains in this state, it would be impertinent in any but a professional person to attempt much more than a statement of his own case, with such general advice as would naturally occur to any intelligent sufferer. Very recently indeed, some suggestions for the more successful treatment of the habit have been discussed both by eminent medical men and by distinguished philanthropists. Could an Institution for this purpose be established, the chief difficulty in the way of the redemption of unhappy thousands would be obviated. The general outline of such a plan will be found at the close of the volume. It seems eminently deserving the profound consideration of all who devote themselves to the promotion of public morals or the alleviation of individual suffering.

THE OPIUM HABIT.

A SUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT TO ABANDON OPIUM.In the personal history of many, perhaps of most, men, some particular event or series of events, some special concurrence of circumstances, or some peculiarity of habit or thought, has been so unmistakably interwoven and identified with their general experience of life as to leave no doubt in the mind of any one of the decisive influence which such causes have exerted. Unexaggerated narrations of marked cases of this kind, while adding something to our knowledge of the marvellous diversities of temptation and trial, of success and disappointment which make up the story of human life, are not without a direct value, as furnishing suggestions or cautions to those who may be placed in like circumstances or assailed by like temptations.The only apology which seems to be needed for calling the attention of the reader to the details which follow of a violent but successful struggle with the most inveterate of all habits, is to be found in the hope which the writer indulges, that while contributing something to the current amount of knowledge as to the horrors attending the habitual use of opium, the story may not fail to encourage some who now regard themselves as hopeless victims of its power to a strenuous and even desperate effort for recovery. Possibly the narrative may also not be without use to those who are now merely in danger of becoming enslaved by opium, but who may be wise enough to profit in time by the experience of another.A man who has eaten much more than half a hundredweight of opium, equivalent to more than a hogshead of laudanum, who has taken enough of this poison to destroy many thousand human lives, and whose uninterrupted use of it continued for nearly fifteen years, ought to be able to say something as to the good and the evil there is in the habit. It forms, however, no part of my purpose to do this, nor to enter into any detailed statement of the circumstances under which the habit was formed. I neither wish to diminish my own sense of the evil of such want of firmness as characterizes all who allow themselves to be betrayed into the use of a drug which possesses such power of tyrannizing over the most resolute will, nor to withdraw the attention of the reader from the direct lesson this record is designed to convey, by saying any thing that shall seem to challenge his sympathy or forestall his censures. It may, however, be of service to other opium-eaters for me to State briefly, that while endowed in most respects with uncommon vigor of any tendency to despondency or hypochondria, an unusual nervous sensibilitv, together with a constitutional tendency to a disordered condition of the digestive organs, strongly predisposed me to accept the fascination of the opium habit. The difficulty, early in life, of retaining food of any kind upon the stomach was soon followed by vagrant shooting pains over the body, which at a later day assumed a permanant chronic form.After other remedies had failed, the eminent physician under whose advice I was acting recommended opium. I have no doubt he acted both wisely and professionally in the prescription he ordered, but where is the patient who has learned the secret of substituting luxurious enjoyment in place of acute pain by day and restless hours by night, that can be trusted to take a correct measure of his own necessities? The result was as might have been anticipated: opium after a few months' use became indispensable. With the full consciousness that such was the case, came the resolution to break off the habit This was accomplished after an effort no more earnest than is within the power of almost any one to make. A recurrence of suffering more than usually severe led to a recourse to the same remedy, but in largely increased quantities. After a year or two's use the habit was a second time broken by another effort much more protracted and obstinate than the first. Nights made weary and days uncomfortable by pain once more suggested the same unhappy refuge, and after a struggle against the supposed necessity, which I now regard as half-hearted and cowardly, the habit was resumed, and owing to the peculiarly unfavorable state of the weather at the time, the quantity of opium necessary to alleviate pain and secure sleep was greater than ever. The habit of relying upon large doses is easily established; and, once formed, the daily quantity is not easily reduced. All persons who have long been accustomed to Opium are aware that there is amaximumbeyond which no increase in quantity does much in the further alleviation of pain or in promoting increased pleasurable excitement. This maximum in my own case was eighty grains, or two thousand drops of laudanum, which was soon attained, and was continued, with occasional exceptions, sometimes dropping below and sometimes largely rising above this amount, down to the period when the habit was finally abandoned. I will not speak of the repeated efforts that were made during these long years to relinquish the drug. They all failed, either through the want of sufficient firmness of purpose, or from the absence of sufficient bodily health to undergo the suffering incident to the effort, or from unfavorable circumstances of occupation or situation which gave me no adequate leisure to insure their success. At length resolve upon a final effort to emancipate myself from the habit.For two or three years previous to this time my general health had been gradually improving. Neuralgic disturbance was of less frequent occurrence and was less intense, the stomach retained its food, and, what was of more consequence, the difficulty of securing a reasonable amount of sleep had for the most part passed away. Instead of a succession of wakeful nights any serioious interruption of habitual rest occurred at infrequent intervals, and was usually limited to a single night.In addition to these hopeful indications in encouragement of a vigorous effort to abandon the habit, there were on the other hand certain warnings which could not safely be neglected. The stomach began to complain,—as well it might after so many years unnatural service,—that the daily task of disposing of a large mass of noxious matter constantly cumulating its deadly assaults upon the natural processes of life was getting to be beyond its powers. The pulse had become increasingly languid, while the aversion to labor of any kind seemed to be settling down into a chronic and hopeless infirmity. Some circumstances connected with my own situation pointed also to the appropriateness of the present time for an effort which I knew by the experience of others would make a heavy demand upon all one's fortitude, even when these circumstances were most propitious. At this period my time was wholly at my own disposal. My family was a small one, and I was sure of every accessory support I might need from them to tide me over what I hoped would prove only a temporary, though it might be a severe, struggle. The house I occupied was fortunately so situated that no outcry of pain, nor any extorted eccentricity of conduct, consequent upon the effort I proposed to make, could be observed by neighbors or by-passers.A few days before the task was commenced, and while on a visit to the capital of a neighboring State in company with a party of gentlemen from Baltimore, I had ventured upon reducing by one-quarter the customary daily allowance of eighty grains. Under the excitement of such an occasion I continued the experiment for a second day with no other perceptible effect than a restless indisposition to remain long in the same position. This, however, was a mere experiment, a prelude to the determined struggle I was resolved upon making, and to which I had been incited chiefly through the encouragement suggested by the success of De Quincey. There is a page in the "Confessions" of this author which I have no doubt has, been perused with intense interest by hundreds of opium-eaters. It is the page which gives in a tabular form the gradual progress he made in diminishing the daily quantity of laudanum to which he had long been accustomed. I had read and re-read with great care all that he had seen fit to record respecting his own triumph over the habit. I knew that he had made use of opium irregularly and at considerable intervals from the year 1804 to 1812, and that during this time opium had not become a daily necessity; that in the year 1813 he had become a confirmed opium-eater, "of whom to ask whether on any particular day he had or had not taken opium, would be to ask whether his lungs had performed respiration, or the heart fulfilled its functions;" that in the year 1821 he had published his "Confessions," in which, while leading the unobservant reader to think that he had mastered the habit, he had in truth only so far succeeded as to reduce his daily allowance from a quantity varying from fifty or sixty to one hundred and fifty grains, down to one varying from seven to twelve grains; that in the year 1822 an appendix was added to the "Confessions" which contained a tabular statement of his further progress toward an absolute abandonment of the drug, and indicating his gradual descent, day by day, for thirty-five days, when the reader is naturally led to suppose that the experiment was triumphantly closed by his entire disuse of opium.I had failed, however, to observe that a few pages preceding this detailed statement the writer had given a faint intimation that the experiment had been a more protracted one than was indicated by the table. I had also failed to notice the fact that no real progress had been made during the first four weeks of the attempt: the average quantity of laudanum daily consumed for the first week being one hundred and three drops; of the second, eighty-four drops; of the third, one hundred and forty-two drops; and of the fourth, one hundred and thirty-eight drops; and that in the fifth week the self-denial of more than three days had been rewarded with the indulgence of three hundred drops on the fourth. A careful comparison of this kind, showing that in an entire month the average of the first week had been but one hundred and three drops, while the average of the last had been one hundred and thirty-eight drops, and that in the fifth week a frantic effort to abstain wholly for three days had obliged him to use on the fourth more than double the quantity to which of late he had been accustomed, would have prevented the incautious conclusion, suggested by his table, that De Quincey made use of laudanum but on two occasions after the expiration of the fourth week.Whatever may have been the length of time taken by De Quincey "in unwinding to its last link the chain which bound" him, it is certain we have no means of knowing it from any thing he has recorded. Be it shorter or longer, his failure to state definitely the entire time employed in his experiment occasioned me much and needless suffering. I thought that if another could descend, without the experience of greater misery than De Quincey records, from one hundred and thirty drops of laudanum, equivalent to about five grains of opium, to nothing, in thirty-four or five days, and in this brief period abandon a habit of more than nine years' growth, a more resolved will might achieve the same result in the same number of days, though the starting-point in respect to aggregate quantity and to length of use was much greater. The object, therefore, to be accomplished in my own case was to part company forever with opium in thirty-five days, cost what suffering it might. On the 26th of November, in a half-desperate, half-despondent temper of mind, I commenced the long-descendinggraduswhich I had rapidly ascended so many years before. During this entire period the quantity consumed had been pretty uniformly eighty grains of best Turkey opium daily. Occasional attempts to diminish the quantity, but of no long continuance, and occasional overindulgence during protracted bad weather, furnished the only exceptions to the general uniformity of the habit.The experiment was commenced by a reduction the first day from eighty grains to sixty, with no very marked change of sensations; the second day the allowance was fifty grains, with an observable tendency toward restlessness, and a general uneasiness; the third day a further reduction of ten grains had diminished the usual allowance by one-half, but with a perceptible increase in the sense of physical discomfort. The mental emotions, however, were entirely jubilant The prevailing feeling was one of hopeful exultation. The necessity for eighty grains daily had been reduced to a necessity for only forty, and, therefore, one-half of the dreaded task seemed accomplished. It was a great triumph, and the remaining forty grains were a merebagatelle, to be disposed of with the same serene self-control that the first had been. A weight of brooding melancholy was lifted from the spirits: the world wore a happier look. The only drawback to this beatific state of mind was a marked indisposition to remain quiet, and a restless aversion to giving attention to the most necessary duties.Two days more and I had come down to twenty-five grains. Matters now began to look a good deal more serious. Only fifteen of the last forty grains had been dispensed with; but this gain had cost a furious conflict. A strange compression and constriction of the stomach, sharp pains like the stab of a knife beneath the shoulder-blades, perpetual restlessness, an apparent prolongation of time, so much so that it seemed the day would never come to a close, an incapacity of fixing the attention upon any subject whatever, wandering pains over the whole body, the jaw, whenever moved, making a loud noise, constant iritability of mind and increased sensibility to cold, with alternations of hot flushes, were some of the phenomena which manifested themselves at this stage of the process. The mental elations of the first three days had become changed by the fifth into a state of high nervous excitement; so that while on the whole there was a prevailing hopefulness of temper, and even some remaining buoyancy of spirits, arising chiefly from the certainty that already the quantity consumed had been reduced by more than two-thirds, the conviction had, nevertheless, greatly deepened, that the task was like to prove a much more serious one than I had anticipated. Whether it was possible at present to carry the descent much further had become a grave question. The next day, however, a reduction of five grains was somehow attained; but it was a hard fight to hold my own within this limit of twenty grains. From this stage commenced the really intolerable part of the experience of an opium-eater retiring from service. During a single week, three-quarters of the daily allowance had been relinquished, and in this fact, at least, there was some ground for exultation. If what had been gained could only be secured beyond any peradventure of relapse, so far a positive success would be achieved.Had the experiment stopped here for a time until the system had become in some measure accustomed to its new habits, possibly the misery I subsequently underwent might some of it have been spared me. However this may be, I had not the patience of mind necessary for a protracted experiment. What I did must be done at once; if I would win I must fight for it, and must find the incentive to courage in the conscious desperation of the contest.From the point I had now reached until opium was wholly abandoned, that is, for a month or more, my condition may be described by the single phrase, intolerable and almost unalleviated wretchedness. Not for a waking moment during this time was the body free from acute pain; even in sleep, if that may be called sleep which much of it was little else than a state of diminished consciousness, the sense of suffering underwent little remission. What added to the aggravation of the case, was the profound conviction that no further effort of resolution was possible, and that every counteracting influence of this kind had been already wound up to its highest tension. I might hold my own; to do anything more I thought impossible. Before the month had come to an end, however, I had a good deal enlarged my conceptions of the possible resources of the will when driven into a tight corner.The only person outside of my family to whom I had confided the purpose in which I was engaged was a gentleman with whom I had some slight business relations, and who I knew would honor any demands I might make in the way of money. I had assured him that by New Year's Day I should have taken opium for the last time, and that any extravagance of expenditure would not probably last beyond that date. Upon this assurance, but confessedly having little or no faith in it, he asked me to dine with him on the auspicious occasion.So uncomfortable had my condition and feelings become in the rapid descent from eighty grains to twenty in less than a week, that I determined for the future to diminish the quantity by only a single grain daily, until the habit was finally mastered. In the twenty-nine days which now remained to the first of January, the nine days more than were needed, at the proposed rate of diminution, would, I thought, be sufficient to meet any emergency which might arise from occasional lapses of firmness in adhering to my self-imposed task, and more especially for the difficulties of the final struggle—difficulties I believe to be almost invariably incident to any strife which human nature is called upon to make in overcoming not merely an obstinate habit but the fascination of a long-entranced imagination. Up to this time I had taken the opium as I had always been accustomed to do, in a single dose on awaking in the morning. I now, however, divided the daily allowance into two portions, and after a day or two into four, and then into single grains. The chief advantage which followed this subdivision of the dose was a certain relief to the mind, which for a few days had become fully aware of the power which misery possesses of lengthening out the time intervening between one alleviation and another, and which shrank from the weary continuance of an entire day's painful and unrelieved abstinence from the accustomed indulgence. The first three days from the commencement of this grain by grain descent was marked by obviously increased impatience with any thing like contradiction or opposition, by an absolute aversion to reading, and by a very humiliating sense of the fact that thevis vitaehad somehow become pretty thoroughly eliminated from both mind and body. Still, when night came, as with long-drawn steps it did come, there was the consciousness that something had been gained, and that this daily gain, small as it was, was worth all it had cost. The tenth day of the experiment had reduced my allowance to sixteen grains. The effect of this rapid diminution of quantity was now made apparent by additional symptoms. The first tears extorted by pain since childhood were forced out as by some glandular weakness. Restlessness, both of body and mind, had become extreme, and was accompanied with a hideous and almost maniacal irritability, often so plainly without cause as sometimes to provoke a smile from those who were about me.For a few days a partial alleviation from too minute attention to the pains of the experiment were found in vigorous horseback exercise. The friend to whose serviceableness in pecuniary matters I have already alluded, offered me the use of a saddle-horse. The larger of the two animals which I found in his Stable was much too heroic in appearance for me in my state of exhaustion to venture upon. Besides this, his Roman nose and severe gravity of aspect somehow reminded me, whenever I entered his stall, of the late Judge ——, to whose Lectures on the Constitution I had listened in my youth, and in my then condition of moral humiliation I felt the impropriety of putting the saddle on an animal connected with such respectable associations. No such scruples interfered with the use of the other animal, which was kept chiefly, I believe, for servile purposes. He was small and mean-looking—his foretop and mane in a hopeless tangle, with hay-seed on his eyelids, and damp straws scattered promiscuously around his body.Inconsiderable as this animal was, both in size and action, he was almost too much for me, in the weak state to which I was now reduced. This much, however, I owe him; disreputable-looking as he was, he was still a something upon whidi my mind could rest as a point of diversion from myself—a something outside of my own miseries. At this time the sense of physical exhaustion had become so great that it required an effort to perform the most common act. The business of dressing was a serious tax upon the energies. To put on a coat, or draw on a boot, was no light labor, and was succeeded by such a feeling of prostration as required the morning before I could master sufficient energy to venture upon the needed exercise. The distance to my friend's stable was trifling. Sometimes I would find there the negro man to whose care the horses were entrusted, but more frequently he was absent. A feeling of humiliation at being seen by any one at a loss how to mount a horse of so diminutive proportions, would triumph over the sense of bodily weakness whenever he was present to bridle and saddle him. Whenever he was not at hand the task of getting the saddle on the pony's back was a long and arduous one. As for lifting it from its hook and throwing it to its place, I could as easily have thrown the horse itself over the stable. The only way in which it could be effected was by first pushing the saddle from its hook, checking its fall to the floor by the hand, and then resting till the violent action of the heart had somewhat abated; next, with occasional failures, to throw it over the edge of the low manger; then an interval of panting rest. Shortening the halter so far as to bring the pony's head close to the manger, next enabled me easily to push him into a line nearly parallel with it, leaving me barely space enough to pass between. By lengthening the stirrup strap I was enabled to get it across his neck, and by much pulling, finally haul the saddle to its proper place. By a kind of desperation of will I commonly succeeded, though by no means always. Sometimes the mortification and rage at a failure so contemptible assured success on a second trial, with apparently less expenditure of exertion than at first. Occasionally, however, I was forced to call for assistance from sheer exhaustion. The bridling was comparatively an easy matter; with his head so closely tied to the manger little scope was left for dodging. In the irritable condition I was now in, the most trifling opposition made me angry, and anger gave me strength; and in this sudden vigor of mind the issue of our daily struggle was, I believe, with a single exception, on my side.When I led him into the yard, the insignificance of his appearance, in contrast with the labor it had cost me to get him there, was enough to make any one laugh, excepting perhaps a person suffering the punishment I was then undergoing. Mounting the animal called for a final struggle of determination with weakness. A stone next the fence was the chief reliance in this emergency. It placed me nearly on a level with the stirrup, while the fence enabled me to steady myself with my hand and counteract the tremulousness of the knees, which made mounting so difficult. On one occasion, however, my dread of being observed induced me to make too great an effort. Hearing some one approach, I attempted to raise myself in the stirrup without the aid of stone or fence, but it was more than I could manage. Hardly had I succeeded in raising myself from the ground when my extreme feebleness was manifest, and I fell prostrate upon my back. With the help of the colored woman, the astonished witness of my fall, I finally succeeded in getting upon the horse. Once seated, however, I felt like another person. The vigorous application of a whip, heartily repeated for a few strokes, would arouse the pony into a sullen canter, out of which he would drop with a demonstrative suddenness that made it difficult to keep my seat. In this way considerable relief was obtained for several days from the exasperations produced by the long continuance of pain. After about a fortnight's use of the animal, and when I had learned to be content with half a dozen grains of opium daily, I found myself too weak and helpless to venture on his back, and thus our acquaintance terminated. As this is the first, and probably the last appearance of my equine friend in print, I may as well say that he was sold a short time afterward in the Fifth Street Horse Market, for the sum of forty-three dollars. This is but a meagre price, but the horse had not then become historical.For the week I was dropping from sixteen grains to nine the addition of new symptoms was slight, but the aggravation of the pain previously endured was marked. The feeling of bodily and mental wretchedness was perpetual, while the tedium of life and occasional vague wishes that it might somehow come to an end were not infrequent. The chief difficulty was to while away the hours of day-light. My rest at night had indeed become imperfect and broken, but still it was a kind of sleep for several hours, though neither very refreshing nor very sound. Those who were about me say that I was in constant motion, but of this I was unconscious. I only recollect that wakening was a welcome relief from the troubled activity of my thoughts. After my morning's ride I usually walked slowly and hesitatingly to the city, but as this occupied only an hour the remaining time hung wearily upon my hands. I could not read—I could hardly sit for five consecutive minutes. Many suffering hours I passed daily either in a large public library or in the book-stores of the city, listlessly turning over the leaves of a book and occasionally reading a few lines, but too impatient to finish, a page, and rarely apprehending what I was reading. The entire mental energies seemed to be exhausted in the one consideration—how not to give in to the tumult of pain from which I was suffering. Up to this time I had from boyhood made a free use of tobacco. The struggle with opium in which I was now so seriously engaged had repeatedly suggested the propriety of including the former also in the contest. While the severity of the struggle would, I supposed, be enhanced, the self-respect and self-reliance, the opposition and even obduracy of the will would, I hoped, be enough increased as not seriously to hazard the one great object of leaving off opium forevcr. Still I dreaded the experiment of adding a feather's weight to the sufferings I was then enduring. An accidental circumstance, however, determined me upon making the trial; but to my surprise, no inconvenience certainly, and scarce a consciousness of the deprivation accompanied it. The opium suffering was so overwhelming that any minor want was aimost inappreciable. The next day brought me down to nine grains of Opium. It was now the sixteenth day of December, and I had still fifteen days remaining before the New Year would, as I had resolved, bring me to the complete relinquishment of the drug. The three days which succeeded the disuse of tobacco caused no apparent intensification of the suffering I had been experiencing. On the fourth day, however, and for the fortnight which succeeded, the agony of pain was inexpressibly dreadful, except for the transient intervals when the effects of the opium were felt.For a few days I had been driven to the alternative of using brandy or increasing the dose of opium. I resorted to the former as the least of the two evils. In the condition I was now in it caused no perceptible exhilaration. It did however deaden pain, and made endurance possible. Especially it helped the weary nights to pass away. At this time an entirely new series of phenomena presented themselves. The alleviation caused by brandy was of short continuance. After a few days' use, sleep for any duration, with or without stimulants, was an impossibility. The sense of exhausting pain was unremitted day and night. The irritability both of mind and body was frightful. A perpetual stretching of the joints followed, as though the body had been upon the rack, while acute pains shot through the limbs, only sufficiently intermitting to give place to a sensation of nerveless helplessness. Impatience of a state of rest seemed now to have become chronic, and the only relief I found was in constant though a very uncertain kind of walking which daily threatened to come to an end from general debility. Each morning I would lounge around the house as long as I could make any pretext for doing so, and then ride to the city, for at this time the mud was too deep to think of walking. Once on the pavements, I would wander around the streets in a weary way for two or three hours, frequently resting in some shop or store wherever I could find a seat, and only anxious to get through another long, never-ending day.The disuse of tobacco, together with the consequences of the diminished use of opium, had now induced a furious appetite. Dining early at a restaurant of rather a superior character, where bread, crackers, pickles, etc., were kept on the table in much larger quantities than it was supposed possible for one individual to need, my hunger had become so extreme that I consumed not only all for which I had specially called, but usually every thing else upon the table, leaving little for the waiter to remove except empty dishes and his own very apparent astonishment. This, it should be understood, was a surreptitious meal, as my own dinner-hour was four o'clock, at which time I was as ready to do it justice as though innocent of all food since a heavy breakfast. The hours intervening between this first and second dinner it was difficult to pass away. The ability to read even a newspaper paragraph had ceased for a number of days. From habit, indeed, I continued daily to wander into several of the city book-stores and into the public library, but the only use I was able to make of their facilities consisted in sitting, but with frequent change of chairs, and looking listlessly around me. The one prevailing feeling now was to get through, somehow or anyhow, the experiment I was suffering under.Early in the trial my misgivings as to the result had been frequent; but after the struggle had become thoroughly an earnest one, a kind of cast-iron determination made me sure of a final triumph. The more the agony of pain seemed intolerable, the more seemed to deepen the certainty of my conviction that I should conquer. I thought at times that I could not survive such wretchedness, but no other alternative for many days presented itself to my mind but that of leaving off opium or dying. I recall, indeed, a momentary exception, but the relaxed resolution lasted only as the lightning-flash lasts, though like the lightning it irradiated for a brilliant instant the tumult that was raging within me. For several days previous to this transient weakness the weather had been heavy and lowering, rain falling irregularly, alternating with a heavy Scottish mist. During one of the last days of this protracted storm my old nervous difficulty returned in redoubled strength. Commencing in the shoulder, with its hot needles it crept over the neck and speedily spread its myriad fingers of fire over the nerves that gird the ear, now drawing their burning threads and now vibrating the tense agony of these filaments of sensation. By a leap it next mastered the nerves that surround the eye, driving its forked lightning through each delicate avenue into the brain itself, and confusing and confounding every power of thought and of will. This is neuralgia—such neuralgia as sometimes drives sober men in the agony of their distress into drunkenness, and good men into blasphemy.While suffering under a paroxysm of this kind, rendered all the more difficult to endure from the exhausted state of the body—in doubt even, at intervals, whether my mind was still under my own control—an impulse of almost suicidal despair suggested the thought, "Go back to opium; you can not stand this." The temptation endured but for a moment, "No, I have suffered too much, and I can not go back. I had rather die;" and from that moment the possibility of resuming the habit passed from my mind forever.It was at night, however, that the suffering from this change of habit became most unendurable. While the day-light lasted it was possible to go out-of-doors, to sit in the sunlight, to walk, to do something to divert attention from the exhausted and shattered body; but when darkness fell, and these resources failed, nothing remained except a patient endurance with which to combat the strange torment. The only disposition toward sleep was now limited to the early evening. Double dinners, together with the disuse of tobacco, began at this time to induce a fullness of habit in spite of bodily pain. In addition to this, the liver was seriously affected—which seems to be a concomitant of the rapid disuse of opium—and a tendency to heavy drowsiness resulted, as usually happens when this organ is disordered. As early as six or seven o'clock an unnatural heaviness would oppress the senses, shutting out the material world, but not serving wholly to extinguish the consciousness of pain, and which commonly lasted for an hour or two. For no longer period could sleep be induced upon any terms. During these wretched weeks the moments seemed to prolong themselves into hours, and the hours into almost endless durations of time. The monotonous sound of the ticking clock often became unendurable. The calmness of its endlessly-repeated beats was in jarring discord with my own tumultuous sensations. At times it seemed to utter articulate sounds. "Ret-ri-bu-tion" I recollect as being a not uncommon burden of its song. As the racked body, and the mind, possibly beginning to be diseased, became intolerant of the odious sound, the motion of the clock was sometimes stopped, but the silence which succeeded was even worse to the disordered imagination than the voices which had preceded it. With the eyes closed in harmony with the deadly stillness, all created nature seemed annihilated, except my single, suffering self, lying in the midst of a boundless void. If the eyes were opened, the visible world would return, but peopled with sights and sounds that made the misty vastness less intolerable. There appeared to be nothing in these sensations at all approaching the phenomena exhibited in delirium tremens. On the contrary, the mind was always and perfectly aware, except for the instant, of the unreal nature of these deceptions and illusions.A single case will sufficiently illustrate the nature of some of these apparitions. In the absence of sleep, and while engaged as was not unusual at this period in the perpetration of doggerel verse, the irritation of the stomach became intolerable. The sensation seemed similar to what. I had read of the final gnawings of hunger in persons dying of starvation; a new vitality appeared to be imparted to the organ, revealing to the consciousness a capacity for suffering previously unsuspected. In the earlier stages, this feeling, which did not exhibit itself till somewhat late in the process of leaving off opium, was marked by an insatiable craving for stimulus of some sort, and a craving which would hardly take denial. While suffering in this way intolerably on one occasion, and after having attempted in vain to find some possible alleviation suggested in the pages of De Quincey, which lay near me, I threw myself back on the bed with the old resolution to fight it out. Almost immediately an animal like a weasel in shape, but with the neck of a crane and covered with brilliant plumage, appeared to spring from my breast to the floor. A venerable Dutch market-woman, of whom I had been in the habit of purchasing celery, seemed to intervene between me and the animal, begging me not to look at it, and covering it with her apron. Just as I was about to remonstrate against her interference, something seemed to give way in the chest and the violence of the pain suddenly abated.It may aid the reader to form some adequate notion of the dreary length to which these nights drew themselves along, to mention that on one occasion, wearied out and disgusted with such illusions, I resolved neither to look at the clock nor open my eyes for the next two hours. It then wanted ten minutes to one; at ten minutes to three my compact with myself would close. For what seemed thousands upon thousands of times I listened to the clock's steady ticking. I heard it repeat with murderous iteration, "Ret-ri-bu-tion," varied occasionally, under some new access of pain, with other utterances. Though ordinarily so little endowed with the poetic gift as never to have attempted to write a line of verse, yet at this time, and for a few days previous, I had experienced a strange development of the rhythmical faculty, and on this particular occasion I made verses, such as they were, with incredible ease and rapidity. I remember being greatly troubled by the necessity for a popular national hymn, and manufactured several with extempore rapidity. Had their merit at all corresponded with the frightful facility with which they were composed, they would have won universal popularity. Unfortunately, the effusions were never written down, and can not, therefore, be added to that immense mass of trash which demonstrates the still possible advent of a true AmericanMarseillaise.With these tasks accomplished, and with a suspicion that the allotted hours must have long expired, I would yet remind myself that I was in a condition to exaggerate the lapse of time; and then, to give myself every assurance of fidelity to my purpose, I would start off on a new term of endurance. I seemed to myself to have borne the penance for hours, to have made myself a shining example of what a resolute will can do under circumstances the most inauspicious. At length, when certain that the time must have much more than expired, and with no little elation over the happy result of the experiment, I looked up to the clock and found it to be just three minutes past one! Little as the mind had really accomplished, the sense of its activity in these few minutes had been tremendous. Measuring time by the conscious succession of ideas may, if I may say it parenthetically, be no more than the same infirmity of our limited human faculties which just now is leading so many men of science, consciously or unconsciously, to recognize in Nature co-ordinate gods, self-subsisting and independent of the ever-living and all-present God.During the five days in which I was descending from the use of six grains of opium to two, the indications of the changes going on in the system were these: The gnawing sensation in the stomach continued and increased; the plethoric feeling was unabated, the pulse slow and heavy, usually beating about forty-seven or forty-eight pulsations to the minute; the blood of the whole system seemed to be driven to the extremities of the body; my face had become greatly flushed; the fingers were grown to the size of thumbs, while they, together with the palms of the hands and the breast, parted with their cuticle in long strips. The lower extremities had become hard, as through the agency of some compressed fluid. A prickling sensation over the body, as if surcharged with electricity, and accompanied with an apparent flow of some hot liquid down the muscles of the arms and legs, exhibited itself at this time. A constant perspiration of icy coldness along the spine had also become a conspicuous element in this strange aggregation of suffering. The nails of the fingers were yellow and dead-looking, like those of a corpse; a kind of glistening leprous scales formed over the hands; a constant tremulousncss pervaded the whole system, while separate small vibrations of the fibres on the back of the hand were plainly visible to the eye. To these symptoms should be added a dimness of sight often so considerable as to prevent the recognition of objects even at a short distance.With an experience of which this is only a brief outline, Christmas Day found me using but two grains of opium. Seven days still remained to me before I was to be brought by my pledge to myself to the last use of the drug. For several days previous to this I had abandoned my bed, through apprehension of falling whenever partial sleep left the tumbling and tossing body exempt from the control of the will, and had betaken myself to a low couch made up before the fire, with a second bed on the floor by its side. The necessity for such precaution was repeatedly indicated, but through the kindest care of those whose solicitude never ceased, and who added inexpressibly to this kindness by controlling as far as possible every appearance of solicitude, no injury resulted.Under the accumulated agony of this part of the trial I began to fear that my mind might give way. I was conscious of occasional fury of temper under very slight provocation. An expressman had charged me what was really an extortionate sum for bringing out a carriage from the city. I can laugh now over the absurd way in which I attacked him, not so much I am sure to save the overcharge as to get rid on so legitimate an object of my accumulated irritability. After nearly an hour's angry dispute, in which I watched successfully and with a malicious ingenuity for any opening through which I could enrage him, and for doing which I am certain he would forgive me if he had known how much I was suffering, he at last gave up the contest by exclaiming, "For heaven's sake give me any thing you please—only let me go!" I had not only saved my money, but felt myself greatly refreshed at finding there was so much life left in me.It should have been stated before, that when the daily allowance had been reduced to six grains that quantity was divided into twelve pills, and that as this was diminished the size of the pills became gradually smaller till each of them only represented an eighth of a grain. As the daily amount of opium became smaller, although its general effect on the system was necessarily diminished, the conscious relief obtained from each of its fractional parts was for a few minutes more apparent than when these sub-divisions were first made. In this way it was possible so to time the effect as to throw their brief anodyne relief upon the dinner-hour or any other time when it might be convenient to have the agony of the struggle a little alleviated.While I am not desirous of going into needless detail respecting all the particular phenomena of the process through which I was now passing, it may yet give the reader a more definite idea of the extremely nervous state to which I was reduced, if I mention that so nearly incapable had my hand become of holding a pen, that whenever it was absolutely necessary for me to write a few lines I could only manage it by taking the pen in one quivering hand, then grasp it with the other to give it a little steadiness, watching for an interval in the nervous twitching of the arm and hand, and then, making an uncertain dash at the paper, scrawl a word or two at long intervals. In this way I continued for several weeks to prepare the few brief notes I was obliged to write. My signature at this period I regard with some curiosity and more pride. It is certainly better than that of Guido Faux, affixed to his examination after torture, though it is hardly equal to the signature of Stephen Hopkins to the Declaration of Independence.Christmas Day found me in a deplorable condition. No symptom of dissolving nature seemed alleviated; indeed the aggravation of the previous ones, especially of the already unendurable irritation of the stomach, was very obvious. In addition to this, the protracted wakefulness at night began to tell upon the brain, and I resolved to make my case known to a physician. I should have done this long before, but I had been deterred by two things—a long-settled conviction that all recovery from such habits must be essentially the patient's own resolute act, and my misfortune in never having found among my medical friends any one who had made the opium disease a special study, or who knew very much about it. The weather was excessively disagreeable, the heavens, about forty feet off, distilling the finest and most penetrating kind of moisture, while the limestone soil under the influence of the long rain had made walking almost impossible. With frantic impatience I waited until an omnibus made its appearance long after it was due, but crowded outside and in. The only unoccupied spot was the step of the carriage. How in my enfeebled condition I could hold on to this jolting standing-place for half an hour was a mystery I could not divine. With many misgivings I mounted the step, and by rousing all my energies contrived for a few minutes to retain my foot-hold. My knees seemed repeatedly ready to give way beneath me, my sight became dim, and my brain was in a whirl; but I still held on. I would gladly have left the omnibus, but I was certain that I should fall if I removed my hands from the frame-work of the door by which I was holding on. At length, a middle-aged Irish woman who had been observing me said, "You look very pale, Sir; I am afraid you are sick. You must take my seat." I thanked her, but told her I feared I had not strength enough to step inside. Two men helped me in, and a few minutes afterward an humble woman was kneeling in her wet clothing in the Church of St. ——, not the less penetrated, I trust, with the divine spirit of that commemorative day by her self-denying kindness to a stranger in his extremity. When the paved sidewalk was at last reached I started, after a few minutes' rest, in search of a physician. Purposely selecting the least-frequented streets, in dread of falling if obliged to turn from a direct course, as might be necessary in a crowded thoroughfare, I walked down to the office of the medical man whom I wished to consult; but when I arrived it seemed to me that my case was beyond human aid, and I walked on. I can, perhaps, find no better place than this in which to call the distinct attention of opium-eaters who may be induced to start out on their own reformation, to the all-important fact that no part of the body will be found so little affected by the rapid disuse of opium as the muscles used in walking. I am no physiologist, and do not pretend to explain it, but it is a most fortunate circumstance that in the general chaos and disorder of the rest of the system, the ability to walk, on which so much of the possibility of recovery rests, is by far the least affected of all the physical powers.During the morning, however, my wretchedness drove me again to the office of the same physician. He listened courteously to my statement; said it was a very serious case, but outside of any reliable observation of his own, and recommended me to consult a physician of eminence residing in quite a different part of the city. He also expressed the hope, though I thought in no very confident tone, that I might be successful, and pretending to shut the door, watched my receding footsteps till I turned a distant corner. I now pass the house of the other physician to whom I was recommended to apply, several times every week, and I often moralize over the apprehension and anxieties with which I then viewed the two or three steps which led to his dwelling. When I arrived opposite his house I stopped and calculated the chances of mounting these steps without falling. I first rested my hand upon the wall and then endeavored to lift my feet upon the second step, but I had not the strength for such an exertion. I thought of crawling to the door, but this was hardly a decorous exhibition for the most fashionable street of the city, filled just then with gayly-dressed ladies. Why I did not ask some gentleman to aid me I can not now recall. I only recollect waiting for several minutes in blank dismay over the seeming impossibility of ever entering the door before me. Finally I went to the curbstone and walked as rapidly and steadily as possible to the lower step, and summoning all my energies made a plunge upward and fortunately caught the door-knob. The physician was at dinner, which gave me some time to recover myself from the agitation into which I had been thrown. After I had narrated my case with special reference to the suspicion of internal inflammation and its possible effect upon the brain, he assured me that no danger of the kind needs to be anticipated. He hoped I might succeed in my purpose, but thought it doubtful. An uncle of his own, a clergyman of some reputation, had died in making the effort. However, if I would take care of my own resolution, he would answer for my continued sanity. He prescribed some preparation of valerian and red pepper, I think, which I used for a week with little appreciable benefit. Finding no great relief from this prescription, or from those of other medical men whom for a few days about this time I consulted, and feeling a constant craving for something bitter, I at last prescribed for myself. Passing a store where liquor was sold, my eye accidentally rested upon a placard in the window which read "Stoughton's Bitters." This preparation gave me momentary relief, and the only appreciable relief I found in medicine during the experiment.The nights now began to bring new apprehensions. A constant dread haunted my mind, in spite of the physician's assurances, that my brain might give way from the excitement under which I labored. I was especially afraid of some sudden paroxysm of mania, under the influence of which I might do myself unpremeditated injury. I never feared any settled purpose of self-injury, but I had become nervously apprehensive of possible wayward and maniacal impulses which might result in acts of violence.My previous business had frequently detained me in the city till a late hour, sometimes as late as midnight. A part of the road that led to my house was quite solitary, with here and there a dwelling or store of the lowest kind. A railroad in process of construction had drawn to particular points on the road small collections of hovels, many of which were whisky-shops, and past these noisy drinking-places it was considered hazardous to walk alone at a late hour. In consequence of the bad reputation of this neighborhood I had purchased a large pistol which I kept ready for an emergency. Now, however, this pistol began to rest heavily upon my mind. The situation of my house was peculiarly favorable for the designs of any marauder. Directly back of it a solitary ravine extended for half a mile or more until it opened upon a populous suburb of the city. This suburb was largely occupied by persons engaged in navigation, or connected with boat-building, or by day-laborers, representing among them many nationalities. The winter of which I am writing was one of unusual stagnation in business and a hard one for the poor to get over. In the nervously susceptible state of my mind at this time, this ravine became a serious discomfort. When the stillness of night settled within and around the house, the rustling of leaves and the distant foot-falls in the ravine became distinctly audible. By some fancy of Judge ——, who built it, the house had no less than seven outside entrances. At intervals I would hear burglars at one of the doors, then at another, nearer or more remote: the prying of levers, the sound of boring, the stealthy footsteps, the carefully-raised window, the heavy breathing of an intruder. Then came the appalling sense of some strange presence, where no outward indication of such presence could be perceived, followed by gliding shaddos revealed by the occasional flicker of the waning fire.Illusions of this nature served to keep the blood at feverheat during the hours of darkness. Night after night the pistol was placed beneath the pillow in readiness for these ghostly intruders. A few days, however, brought other apprehensions worse than those of thieves and burglars. The uncontrollable exasperation of the temper obliged me at length to draw the charge from the pistol, through fear of yielding to some sudden impulse of despair. I had also put out of reach my razors, a hammer, and whatever else might serve as an impromptu means of violence. I remember the grim satisfaction with which I looked upon the brass ornaments of the bedroom fire-place, and reflected that, if worse came to worst, I was not wholly without a resource with which to end my sufferings. For nearly a fortnight previously I had refrained from shaving, dreading I scarce knew what.The day succeeding Christmas I rode to the city and walked the length of innumerable by-streets as my weakness would allow. When too exhausted to walk further, and looking for some place of rest, I observed a barber's sign suspended over a basement room. Fortunately the barber stood in the door-way and helped me to descend the half-dozen stone steps which led to his shop. I told the man to cut my hair, shave me, and shampoo my head. As he began his manipulations it seemed as though every separate hair was endowed with an intense vitality. It was impossible to refrain from mingled screams and groans as I repeatedly caught his arm and obliged him to desist. Luckily the barher was a man of sense, and by his extreme gentleness contrived in the course of an hour to calm down my excitement.When he had finished his work the sense of relief and refreshment was astonishing. In this barber-shop I learned for the first time in what the perfection of earthly happiness consists. The sudden cessation of protracted and severe pain brings with it so exquisite a sense of enjoyment that I do not believe that successful ambition, or requited love, or the gratification of the wildest wishes for wealth, has a happiness to bestow at all comparable to the calm, contented, all-satisfying happiness that comes from a remission of intolerable pain. For the first time in a month I felt an emotion that could be called positively pleasant. As I left the shop I needed no assistance in reaching the sidewalk, and waiked the streets for an hour or two with something of an assured step.Among other indications of the change taking place at this time in the system was the increased freezing perspiration perpetually going on, especially down the spine. This sense of dampness and icy coldness has now continued for many months, and for nearly a year was accompanied with a heavy cold. During the opium-eating years I do not remember to have been affected at all in this latter way; but a severe cold at this time settled upon the lungs, one indication of which was frequent sternutation, consequent apparently upon the inflammation of the mucous membrane.