Horace B. Day

“ This ingenuity manifests itself in subterfuges of a complicated construction and artistic plausibility which might have puzzled Richelieu; but it is really nothing to wonder at when we recollect the law of nature by which any extreme agony, so long as it continues remediable, sharpens and concentrates all a man's faculties upon the one single object of procuring the remedy. If my house is on fire, I run to the hydrant by a mere automatic operation of my nerves. If my leg is caught in the bight of a paying-out hawser, my whole brain focuses at once on that single thought, "an axe." ”

“ Thus I have shown that opium does not, of necessity, produce inactivity or torpor. On the contrary it often led me into markets and theatres. Yet, in candor, I will admit that markets and theatres are not the appropriate haunts of the opium-eater when in the divinest state incident to his enjoyment. In that state crowds become an oppression to him; music, even, too sensual and gross. He naturally seeks solitude and silence as indispensable conditions of those trances, or profoundest reveries, which are the crown and consummation of what opium can do for human nature. ”

“ Have you ever thought of trying large doses of opium, a hot climate, keeping your body open by grapes, and the fruits of the climate? Is it possible that by drinking freely you might at last produce the gout, and that a violent pain and inflammation in the extremities might produce new trains of motion and feeling in your stomach, and the organs connected with the stomach, known and unknown? I know by a little what your sufferings are, and that to shut the eyes and stop up the ears is to give one's self up to storm and darkness, and the lurid forms and horrors of a dream. ”

“ The path toward perfect recovery is certainly a weary one to travel; but in all these long years, with nervous sensibilities unnaturally active, in much pain of body, through innumerable sleepless nights, with hope deferred and the expectation of complete restoration indefinitely prolonged, I have never lost faith in the final triumph of a patient and persistent resolution. Many men seem to know little of the wonderful power which simple endurance has, in determining every conflict between good and evil. The triumph which is achieved in a single day is a triumph hardly worth the having ”

“ To the opium-consumer, when deprived of this stimulant, there is nothing that life can bestow, not a blessing that man can receive, which would not come to him unheeded, undesired, and be a curse to him. There is but one all-absorbing want, one engrossing desire—his whole being has but one tongue—that tongue syllables but one word—morphia. And oh! the vain, vain attempt to break this bondage, the labor worse than useless—a minnow struggling to break the toils that bind a Triton! ”

“ Those who have used distilled or fermented drinks, tobacco, and sometimes coffee and tea in excess, experience for a time a strong and definite craving for the wonted indulgence. This is never the case with the opium-eater; he has no specific desire whatever for the drug. The only difficulty he has to encounter is the agony of pain—for no other word adequately expresses the suffering he endures—conjoined with a general desire for relief. Yet in the very acme of his punishment he will be sensible of no craving for opium at all like the craving of the drunkard for spirits. ”

“ If my father sought more from opium than the mere absence of pain, I feel assured that it was not luxurious sensations or the glowing phantasmagoria of passive dreams, but that the power of the medicine might keep down the agitations of his nervous system, released for a time at least from the tyranny of ailments which by a spell of wretchedness fix the thoughts upon themselves, perpetually throwing them inward as into a stifling gulf. ”

“ At the end of this period there would be a sense of depression amounting to little beyond uneasiness. But soon four hours' deprivation of the drug gave rise to a physical and mental prostration that no pen can adequately depict, no language convey: a horror unspeakable, a woe unutterable takes possession of the entire being; a clammy perspiration bedews the surface, the eye is stony and hard, the noise pointed, as in the hippocratic face preceding dissolution, the hands uncertain, the mind restless, the heart as ashes, the "bones marrowless." ”

“ I will not again refer to the mournful effects produced on your own health from this indulgence in opium, by which you have undermined your strong constitution; but I must notice the injurious consequences which this passion for the narcotic drug has on your literary efforts. What you have already done, excellent as it is, is considered by your friends and the world as the bloom, the mere promise of the harvest. Will you suffer the fatal draught, which is ever accompanied by sloth, to rob you of your fame, and, what to you is a higher motive, of your power of doing good ”

“ Wine robs a man of his self-possesion; opium greatly invigorates it. Wine unsettles and clouds the judgment, and gives a preternatural brightness and a vivid exaltation to the contempts and the admirations, to the loves and the hatreds, of the drinker; opium, on the contrary, communicates serenity and equipoise to all the faculties, active or passive; and, with respect to the temper and moral feelings in general, it gives simply that sort of vital warmth which is approved by the judgment, and which would probably always accompany a bodily constitution of primeval or antediluvian health. ”

“ I am always in favor of a man's "breaking off short" if he can. I believe that the majority of people who have used the drug less than a year can, but the number who are able to do it after that diminish in geometric ratio with every month of habituation.
I therefore permit Mr. Edgerton, as soon as his stomach will bear it, to return to the use of opium.
But before giving him his dose I make the stipulation that from this moment he shall deal as frankly with me as he does with his own consciousness—that we shall have no opium secrets apart. ”

“ He lies under the weight of incubus and nightmare; he lies in sight of all that he would fain perform, just as a man forcibly confined to his bed by the mortal languor of a relaxing disease, who is compelled to witness injury or outrage offered to some object of his tenderest love: he curses the spells which chain him down from motion; he would lay down his life if he might but get up and walk; but he is powerless as an infant, and can not even attempt to rise. ”

“ Opium is a corrosion and paralysis of all the noblest forms of life. The man who voluntarily addicts himself to it would commit in cutting his throat a suicide only swifter and less ignoble. The habit is gaining fearful ground among our professional men, the operatives in our mills, our weary sewing-wormen, our fagged clerks, our disappointed wives, our former liquor-drunkards, our very day-laborers, who a generation ago took gin. All our classes from the highest to the lowest are yearly increasing their consumption of the drug. ”

“ During the nights I sat by him these occasional relaxations, as I learned, reached their maximum length, my familiar presence acting as a sedative, but from each of them he woke bathed in perspiration from sole to crown; shivering under alternate flushes of chill and fever; mentally confused to a degree which for half an hour rendered every object in the room unnatural and terrible to him; with a nervous jerk, which threw him quite out of bed, although in his waking state two men were requisite to move him; and with a cry of agony as loud as any under amputation. ”

“ Death will probably occur at any rate not from an attack of what we usually consider disease, but from the disintegrating effects on tissue of the habit itself. So, whatever he may do, his organs march to death. He will have to continue the habit which kills him only because abandoning it kills him sooner; for self-murder has dropped out of the purview of the moral faculties and become a mere animal question of time. The only way left him to preserve his intellectual faculties intact is to keep his future daily dose at the tolerable minimum. ”

“ In sufficiently full flesh, with ruddy cheeks and skin clear as a healthy child's, the beholder would pronounce him in the height of health and vigor, and would glow with indignation at seeing him loitering about day after day, doing little save sleep, in a world where so much work needs to be done. And yet he feels all but impotent for enterprise, or any active physical efforts; for there is scarce enough nervous force in him to move his frame to a lingering walk, and sometimes it seems as if the nervous fibres were actually pulled out, and he must move, if at all, by pure force of volition. ”

“ A patient whom, after habitual use of opium for ten years, I met when he had spent eight years more in reducing his daily dose to half a grain of morphia, with a view to its eventual complete abandonment, once spoke to me in these words:
"God seems to help a man in getting out of every difficulty but opium. There you have to claw your way out over red-hot coals on your hands and knees, and drag yourself by main strength through the burning dungeon-bars."
This statement does not exaggerate the feeling of many another opium-eater whom I have known. ”

“ During the latter part of his life he became nearly crippled by the rheumatism."
Under date of July 24, 1800, Coleridge writes: "I have been more unwell than I have ever been since I left school. For many days was forced to keep my bed, and when released from that incarceration I suffered most grievously from a brace of swollen eyelids and a head into which, on the least agitation, the blood was felt as rushing in and flowing back again, like the raking of the tide on a coast of loose stones." ”

“ The totality of the experience is only conceivable by adding this physical torture to a mental anguish which even the Oriental pencil of De Quincey has but feebly painted; an anguish which slays the will, yet leaves the soul conscious of its murder; which utterly blots out hope, and either paralyzes the reasoning faculties which might suggest encouragements, or deadens the emotional nature to them as thoroughly as if they were not perceived ”

“ I pass over all the horrible physical accompaniments that accumulate after some hours' deprivation of the drug when it has long been indulged in, it being borne in mind that it occurs sooner or later according to the constitution it contends against. Suffice it to say that the tongue feels like a copper bolt, and one seems to carry one's alimentary canal in the brain; that is to say, one is perpetually reminded that there is such a canal from the constant sense of pain and uneasiness, whereas the perfection of functional performance is obtained when the mind is unconscious of its operation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But medical men must very well know that a certain state of the liver, mechanically and without any co-operation of the will, expresses itself in sighs. I was much too firm-minded and too reasonable to murmur or complain. I certainly suffered deeply, as one who finds himself a banished man from all that he loves, and who had not the consolations of hope, but feared too profoundly that all my efforts—efforts poisoned so sadly by opium—might be unavailing for the end. ”

“ Instead of the feverish, tumultuous excitement of alcohol, I experienced a calm, equable, thrilling enjoyment. My whole being was exalted from its previous turmoil and perturbation and heat, to dwell in a region of serenity and peace and quiet bliss. But alas for the reverse side of the picture! The total prostration, the depth of depression, the more than infantile feebleness following the reaction of this excitement—the multitude of uneasy, uncomfortable, often bewildering sensations pertaining to the habit, are such as can not be conveyed to one inexperienced in the matter. ”

“ It is one of the most powerful agents at the command of the practitioner, and should no more he trifled with than arsenic or opium. Used by a blundering, shallow-pated empiric it may be worse than useless—may do, as in many cases it has done, incalculable mischief to a patient. In the hands of a clear-sighted, experienced, scientific man, who administers it according to well-known laws of physiology and therapeutics, it is an inestimable remedy, often capable of accomplishing cures without the assistance of any other medicine, and, indeed, where all other has failed. ”

“ After six weeks of exciting labor and solicitude, during which his sleep and his rations were always delayed till exhaustion overpowered him, and then cut down below half the normal standard, he wakes one morning from a slumber heavy as death into a state of the most awful vigilance his mind can conceive of. He even doubts for some moments whether he shall ever sleep again, and in the agony of that strange, wild suspicion, a cold sweat breaks out over him from head to foot. ”

“ Inebriates have been repeatedly known to risk imminent death if they could not reach their liquor in any other way. The grasp with which liquor holds a man when it turns on him, even after he has abused it for a lifetime, compared with the ascendency possessed by opium over the unfortunate habituated to it for but a single year, is as the clutch of an angry woman to the embrace of Victor Hugo's Pieuvre. ”

“ I am led to believe that the records of fatal lesion, mechanical childbirth, cancerous affection, the stake itself, contain no greater torture than a confirmed opium-eater experiences in getting free. Popularly this suffering is supposed to be purely intellectual—but nothing can be wider of the truth.
Its intellectual part is bad enough, but the physical symptoms are appalling beyond representation. The look on the face of the opium sufferer is indeed one of such keen mental anguish that outsiders may well be excused for supposing that is all. ”