Chapter IX: Part 9

The year 1867 passed with him amid depression, shame, and remorse. He called on me perhaps a hundred times at my office, and seldom left without referring in some way to what he considered his degradation. He repeatedly inquired if I thought it of any use for him to try going on any longer in his ministerial work. Once he came with a brighter face than usual, saying he had concluded to try it one year more, and if he could not succeed----. Then what? I inquired as he paused. A dark cloud spreading over his brow was his only answer, and he lapsed into despondency. This despondency appears to be the legitimate effect of opium. This fact was strikingly manifest in the case of Mr. Brush, for his natural disposition, from childhood up, had been usually kind, cheerful, and good; nor had he any dyspeptic or bilious tendencies to worry and sour him. Few men have ever been physically so well organized, or socially and religiously so well situated for the enjoyment of a prosperous and happy life.

He came to me, finally, on the first day of January, 1868, saying his people had kindly granted him leave of absence for a few weeks, which he would devote to the work of overcoming his enemy, if such a thing were possible. He could not live in his bondage. His wretched life, with its terrible end, was forever staring him in the face. He asked me if I would receive him at my house, and take care of him during the struggle, as I had once consented to do. I said I would if he would consent to let the people know why he was there. He looked very sad as he answered that it would not do. He must undertake the battle at home. He then took from his pocket some papers of morphine, which he had caused to be weighed in doses diminishing at the rate of half a grain each, beginning with six grains for the first day, five and a half for the next, and so on, down. This was a sudden falling off of nearly two-thirds from his ordinary allowance. He gave me all but the two largest powders, which he reserved for an absence of two days at Columbus. He proposed going away for the purpose of coming home sick, in which condition he well knew he should be at that time. I was to call at his house on the evening of his return, to render such assistance as his condition might demand.

I went at the time appointed and found him again shattered, trembling, sweating, and hovering about the fire. He said he had slept none, was suffering much, and that his knees especially were aching badly. He called pleadingly for the amount of morphine prepared for that day, as he had not taken it. It was given, and then he conversed freely for an hour or so.

The next evening he proposed to reduce his morphine by two grains instead of half a grain, but was in a hurry for the quantity he was to have. In the course of over two days more he came down to about two grains for the whole day. But one evening, when I found him apparently much relieved from suffering, and he saw my look of wonder and doubt, he confessed having broken over the rules by taking an additional dose of about three grains on his own responsibility. He said his diarrhea had returned, the medicine left to check it was gone, he hated to send for me, and so had done it. He was full of remorse, declaring that if I should now abandon him, he would not blame me. I told him I should stick to him as long as he would let me; that he was doing a great work, such as few men ever succeeded in--a work for two worlds, this one and the next--and that he must not give it up.

I continued to spend the evenings with him for about two weeks. The morphine was reduced to something like one grain a day, his appetite returned, and he began to sleep pretty well at night. His nerves became steady, and his diarrhea was controlled without serious difficulty. Energy and strength returned so rapidly that in about two weeks he was ready to resume his work. He said to his wife that the awful weight was all gone--all gone. He expressed his gratitude to me in the most glowing terms. He was triumphant at the idea of having conquered with so much less suffering than he expected. Alas! I knew his danger, and saw with sorrow that his returning confidence was removing him from under my control while yet the enemy remained in the field.

His last visit to me was on Friday, January 17th. He wanted diarrhea medicine enough to last till the next Tuesday, when he would call again and report. I felt uneasy about him, and went to hear him preach on the intervening Sunday evening. I saw by his flushed and embarrassed manner that he was falling back, and have since learned that after service he confessed to his wife, who was watching his condition with keen eyes, that he had taken about three grains to strengthen him for the occasion. Poor man! He doubtless thought he could stop there. Tuesday came, but he came not to my office. Wednesday, and he came not. Then I was called away from home and did not return until late Saturday night. The first news which greeted me on arriving was, that he was no more. He had been buying morphine at the drug-store during the week, and had reached nearly his former quantity. He had wandered about, uncertain, forlorn, desolate. On Friday he had tried to borrow a gun to shoot rats, had come across the way to my office, which was found closed, and then tried again to borrow the gun. He told his wife that dreadful load had come back. Saturday his Quarterly Meeting commenced. He was to preach in the afternoon. He was exceedingly kind and helpful to his family at dinner-time, as he had been all day. The people were assembling at the church, not far off. He went to the barn, suspended a rope from a beam overhead, as he stood upon the manger. It was not quite long enough. He lengthened it with his pocket-handkerchief, looped it around his neck, put his hands in his pockets, and leaped off.

He was gone forever. He had failed in his last attempt to break away from the benumbing power of opium, and in his desperation had sought freedom in death. Let no man judge him, and least of all those who are strangers to the fascinating and infernal strength of his enemy. You may call it a grave mistake, a dreadful blunder, a doleful insanity, but do not assume to put him beyond the reach of mercy, or to decide that his lamentable end was not the iron door through which he may have passed to the city of the golden streets.

A newspaper account of the death of Mr. Brush having fallen under the notice of a morphine sufferer in Wisconsin, the latter addressed a letter to Dr. Barnes, in which he gives his own remarkable experience in the immediate and absolute abandonment of the habit.

The writer is represented as being about fifty years of age, temperate in his general habits, and though not possessed of great vigor of constitution, as having been through life a hard-working man. His use of morphine began in the year 1861, under a medical prescription for the relief of general debility; but without any knowledge on his part of the character of the remedy he was using. After six months habituation, the attempt to relinquish it proved a failure. For the first two years, morphine appeared to benefit him. At the expiration of this time his daily allowance had become three grains, which quantity was rarely exceeded during the four subsequent years of his bondage. After narrating the mental and physical suffering he underwent in these years, he says:

April 17, 1867, found me a poor, wasted, miserable, six years' morphine-eater; health all gone; unable to do any sort of business; desiring nothing but death to close my sufferings. Then I made up my mind to stop the use of morphine all at once. I had previously attempted to break off by degrees, but I was beaten at that game every time. It is utterly impossible to taper off by less and less, unless some one is over the patient watching every motion. I say it understandingly--the will of no man is strong enough to handle the poison for himself. He will make a virtue out of necessity, and for this time will over-take.

So I resolved to quit at once and forever. I arranged my business as far as I could, under the idea that I should die in the attempt. The first forty-eight hours I slept most of the time, waking somewhat often, however, and then dropping asleep, while a sort of nervous twitching would come and go. But the next day found me wide awake. And--shall I tell you?--there was no more sleep for me until sixty-five days had passed. No, not one single moment for sixty-five days and nights. I was fully awake--never slept one moment! The second day my suffering was intense. Every nerve seemed to be on a rampage. Every faculty, mental and physical, appeared to be striving to see how much suffering I could stand. The third day my bowels began to empty, and a river of old ftid matter ran away. It seemed that I was passing off in corruption. This continued for nearly four long, suffering weeks. I never checked it, but let Nature take her course.

During the first four weeks of the fight there was extreme pain in every part of my body. It seemed to me that I should burn up. This worse than death sensation never left me a single hour for the first thirty-five days. It seemed at times as though my bones would burst open: a sort of nerve fire seemed to be shut up in them which must be let out. I was able to walk out, and if necessary could walk a mile or more.

The fifty-sixth day of suffering without sleep found me at a Water Cure. Warm baths, sometimes with battery, then packs, then sitz baths, for ten more long, suffering days and nights--but sleep never came to me and pain never left me. On the sixty-fifth day of the fight I felt perfectly easy. All my pains were gone. I went to my room and slept nearly four hours. For ten minutes after waking I never stirred a limb or muscle, fearing it would bring back the pains. But a happier man never woke from sleep. I saw that I was delivered from the prison-house of death. I telegraphed to my family that sleep had come. To niy dying-hour I shall ever remember that eventful day. But it was only the glimmering of light. Gradually and slowly sleep came to be my companion again. And even yet it has not fully come. Until within the last twenty days when I awoke, every nerve, every emotion was awake all at once.

It is now the tenth month since I quit morphine. Then my weight was only one hundred and twenty-five pounds. Now it is one hundred and ninety. I am the happiest man on the earth, I am redeemed from one of the lowest hells in all worlds.

In a subsequent letter to Dr. Barnes the writer says: "My health still improves. There is one peculiarity about my will-power; it is so vacillating, not reliable and firm as before. Still I feel that it will come back."

The following declaration, which Dr. Barnes embodies in his article, is deserving the careful consideration both of physicians and philanthropists. He says: "Calling to mind what has come to my knowledge during a long and extensive medical practice, the conclusion is, that I have known of more deaths from the use of opium, in some of its forms, than from all the forms of alcoholic drinks."

A MORPHINE HABIT OVERCOME.

The following record of a successful endeavor to overcome a morphine habit of several years' growth is abbreviated, by permission of the publishers, from _Lippincott's Magazine_ for April, 1868. The absence of the writer in Europe precludes any more definite statement than can be inferred from the narrative itself as to the length of time during which the habit remained uninterrupted. This is a matter of regret, as the _time-element_, in the view of the compiler, enters so largely into the question of the probable recovery of an opium sufferer. Morphine appears certainly to have been taken daily in very large quantities for at least five years after the writer's habit became established.

* * * * *

Since De Quincey gave to the world his famous "Confessions," people have been content to regard opium-eating as a strangely fascinating or as a strangely horrible vice. England, and, as I have recently learned, in this country also. It should be well understood that no man _continues_ an opium-eater from choice; he sooner or later becomes the veriest slave; and it is the object of this paper, originally intended for a friend's hand only, to deter intending neophytes--to warn them from submitting themselves to a yoke which will bow them to the earth. In the hope that it may subserve the good proposed, I venture to give a short account of the experiences of one who still feels in his tissues the yet slowly-smouldering fire of the furnace through which he has passed. I first took opium, in the form of laudanum, nearly ten years ago, for insomnia, or sleeplessness, brought on by overwork at a European university. It seemed as if my tissues lapped up the drug and revelled in the new and strange delight which had opened up to them. All that winter I took doses of from ten to thirty drops every Friday night, there being but few classes on Saturday of any consequence, so that I had the full, uninterrupted effect of the drug. Then I could set to work with unparalleled energy. Thought upon thought flowed to me in never-ending waves. I had a mad striving after intellectual distinction, and felt I would pay any price for it. I generally felt, on the Sunday, my lids slightly heavy, but with a sense pervading me of one who had been taking champagne. I never, however, during this whole winter, took more than one dose a week, varying from thirty to sixty drops. Toward the close of the session I one day deferred the dose till Sunday evening. On the Monday following, in the afternoon, I was in one of the class-rooms listening to the lecturer on Belles-lettres and Rhetoric. One hundred and more young men sat, on that Monday afternoon, listening to his silvery voice as he read extracts from Falconer's "Shipwreck," while the splendid conceptions of the poem, and the opium to boot, taken on the Sunday evening before, were all doing their work on an imaginative young man of nineteen. My blood seemed to make music in my vessels as it seemed to come more highly oxygenized singing to my brain, and tingled fresher and warmer into the capillaries of the entire surface, leaping and bubbling like a mountain-brook after a shower. I knew not at first what it could be, but I felt as if I could have bounded to the desk and taken the place of the professor. For a while, I say, I could not realize the cause. At last, as with a lightning flash, it came. Yes! It was the opium.

And at that moment, then and there was signed the bond which was destined to go far to wither all my fairest hopes; to undermine, while seeming to build up, my highest aspirations; to bring disunion between me and those near and dear to me; to frustrate all my plans, and, while "keeping the word of promise to the ear," ever breaking it to my hope. As I trace these very characters, I am suffering from the remote consequences, in a moral point of view, of having set my hand and seal to that bond.

For two years longer that I remained at college I continued to take laudanum three times a week, and I could, at the end of this period, take two drachms (120 drops) at each dose. All this time my appetite, though not actually destroyed, as it now is, was capricious in the extreme, though I did not lose flesh, at least not markedly so. On the other hand, my capability for mental exertion all through this period was something incredible; and let me say here that one of the most fascinating effects of the drug in the case of an intellectual and educated man is the sense it imparts of what might be termed intellectual daring: add to this the endowments of a strong frame, high animal spirits, and on such an one, opium is the ladder that seems to lead to the gates of heaven. But alas for him when at its topmost rung! After obtaining my degree I gradually eased off the use of the drug for about three months with but little trouble. I was waiting for an appointment in India. At the end of the period named I sailed for my destination, and had almost forgotten the taste of opium; but I found that I was only respited, not redeemed. Two months after I had entered upon my duties, and found myself quietly among my books, the bond was renewed. After two months, in which I passed from laudanum to crude opium, I finally settled on the alkaloid _morphia_, as being the most powerful of all the preparations of opium. I began with half a grain twice a day, and for the six months ending the last day of September of the just expired year, my daily quantum was sixty grains--half taken the instant I awoke, the other half at six o'clock in the evening; and I could no more have avoided putting into my body this daily supply than I could have walked over a burning ploughshare without scorching my feet.

For the first year, five grains, or even two and a half, would suffice for a couple of days; that is to say, there was no craving of the system for it during its deprivation for this space. 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."

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!

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.

The slightest mental or physical exertion is a matter of absolute impossibility. The winding of a watch I have regarded as a task of magnitude when not under the opium influence, and I was no more capable of controlling, under this condition, the cravings of the system for its pabulum, by any exertion of the will, than I, or any one else, could control the dilatation and contraction of the pupils of the eye under the varying conditions of light and darkness. A time arrives when the will is killed absolutely and literally, and at this period you might, with as much reason, tell a man to will not to die under a mortal disease as to resist the call that his whole being makes, in spite of him, for the pabulum on which it has so long been depending for carrying on its work.

When you can with reason ask a man to aerate his lungs with his head submerged in water--when you can expect him to control the movements of his limb while you apply an electric current to its motor nerve--then, but not till then, speak to a confirmed opium-eater of "exerting his will;" reproach him with want of "determination," and complacently say to him, "Cast it from you and bear the torture for a time." Tell him, too, at the same time, to "do without atmospheric air, to regulate the reflex action of his nervous system and control the pulsations of his heart." Tell the Ethiopian to change his skin, but do not mock the misery and increase the agony of a man who has taken opium for years by talking to him of "will." Let it be understood that after a certain time (varying, of course, according to the capability of physical resistance, mode of life, etc., of the individual) the craving for opium is beyond the domain of the will. So intolerant is the system under a protracted deprivation, that I know of two suicides resulting therefrom. They were cases of Chinese who were under confinement. They were baffled on one occasion in carrying out a previously-successful device for obtaining the drug. The awful mystery of death which they rashly solved had no terrors for them equal to a life without opium, and the morning found them hanging in their cells, glad to get "anywhere, anywhere out of the world."

I have seen another tear his hair, dig his nails into his flesh, and, with a ghastly look of despair and a face from which all hope had fled, and which looked like a bit of shrivelled yellow parchment, implore for it as if for more than life.

But to return to myself. I attained a daily dose of forty grains, and on more than one occasion I have consumed sixty. It became my bane and antidote; with it I was an _unnatural_--without it, less than man. Food, for months previous to the time of my attaining to such a dose as sixty grains, became literally loathsome; its sight would sicken me; my muscles, hitherto firm and well defined, began to diminish in bulk and to lose their contour; my face looked like a hatchet covered with yellow ochre: and this is the best and truest comparison I can institute. It was sharp, foreshortened and indescribably yellow. I had then been taking _morphia_ for nearly two years, but only reached and sustained the maximum doses for the six months already indicated.

Finally, even the sixty grains brought no perceptible increase to the vitality of which the body seemed deprived during its abstinence. It stimulated me to not one-tenth of the degree to which a quarter of a grain had done at the commencement. Still, I had to keep storing it up in me, trying to extract vivacity, energy, life itself, from that which was killing me; and grudgingly it gave it. I tried hard to free myself, tried again and again; but I never could at any time sustain the struggle for more than four days at the utmost. At the end of that time I had to yield to my tormentor--yield, broken, baffled, and dismayed--yield to go through the whole struggle over again; forced to poison myself--forced with my own hand to shut the door against hope.

With an almost superhuman effort I roused myself to the determination of doing something, of making one last effort, and, if I failed, to look my fate in the face. What, thought I, was to be the end of all the hopes I once cherished, and which were cherished of and for me by others? of what avail all the learning I had stored up, all the aspirations I nourished?--all being buried in a grave dug by my own hand, and laid aside like funeral trappings, out of sight and memory.

I will not detail my struggles nor speak of the hope which I had to sustain me, and which shone upon me whenever the face of my Maker seemed turned away. Let it suffice that I fought a desperate fight. Again and again I recoiled, baffled and disheartened; but one aim led me on, and I have come out of the _melée_ bruised and broken it may be, but conquering. One month I waged the fight, and I have now been nearly two without looking at the drug. Before, four hours was the longest interval I could endure. Now I am free and the demon is behind me. I must not fail to add that the advantage of a naturally sound and preternaturally vigorous constitution, and (except in the use of opium) one carefully guarded against any of the causes which impart a vicious state of system and so render it incapable of recuperative effort, was my main-stay, and acted the part of a bower-anchor in restoring my general system. This, and a long sea-voyage, aided efforts which would have been otherwise fruitless. On the other hand, let us not too rashly cast a stone at the opium-eater and think of him as a being unworthy of sympathy. If he is not to be envied--as, God knows, he is not--let him not be too much contemned.

I do not now refer to the miserable and grovelling Chinese, who are fed on it almost from the cradle, but to the ordinary cases of educated and intellectual men in this country and in Europe; and I assert that, could there be a realization of all the aspirations, all the longings after the pure, the good and noble that fill the mind and pervade the heart of a cultivated and refined man who takes to this drug, he would be indeed the paragon of animals. And I go further and say that, given a man of cultivated mind, high moral sentiment, and a keen sense of intellectual enjoyment, blended with strong imaginative powers, and just in proportion as he is so endowed will the difficulty be greater in weaning himself from it. I mean, of course, before the will is killed. When that takes place he is of necessity as powerless as any other victim, and his craving for it is as automatic as in the case of any other opium slave. What he becomes then, I have attempted to describe, and in doing so have suppressed much in consideration of the feelings of those who read.

This it is to be an opium-eater; and the boldest may well quail at the picture, drawn not by the hand of fancy, but by one who has supped of its horrors to the full, and who has found that the staff on which he leaned has proven a spear which has well-nigh pierced him to the heart. Let no man believe he will escape: the bond matures at last.

ROBERT HALL--JOHN RANDOLPH--WM. WILBERFORCE,

The compiler has hesitated as to the propriety of calling attention to the opium-habits of these eminent men, both because little instruction is afforded by the meagre information that is accessible to him respecting their use of opium, and because he apprehends their example may be pleaded in extenuation of the habit. Yet they were confirmed opium-eaters, and remained such to the day of their death; and a reference to their cases may not be without its lesson to that large class of men eminent in public or professional life, who already are, or are in danger of becoming, victims of the opium tyranny, as well as to that larger class who find in undiscriminating denunciations of bad habits, a cheap method of exhibiting a cheap philanthropy.

ROBERT HALL.

With the single exception of Richard Baxter, no clergyman of eminence on record appears to have suffered so acutely or for so long a period from nervous disorders as this eloquent divine. So little, unfortunately, is known of the nature of his disorder, that it would be unjust to express any opinion as to the urgency of the temptation which drove him to the enormous consumption of opium in which he indulged. His biography by Olinthus Gregory sufficiently indicates the severity as well as the early manifestation of his painful disorder. "At about six years of age he was placed at a day-school about four miles from his father's residence. At first he walked to school in the morning and home again in the evening. But the severe pain in his back, from which he suffered so much through life, had even then begun to distress him; so that he was often obliged to lie down upon the road; and sometimes his brother and his other school-fellows carried him in turn.

"Sir James Macintosh described Mr. Hall, when in his twentieth year, as attracting notice by a most ingenuous and intelligent countenance, by the liveliness of his manners, and by such indications of mental activity as could not be misinterpreted. His appearance was that of health, yet not of robust health, and he suffered from paroxysms of pain, during which he would roll about on the carpet in the utmost agony; but no sooner had the pain subsided than he would resume his part in conversation with as much cheerfulness and vivacity as before he had been thus interrupted.

"At that period, though he was strong and active, he often suffered extremely from the pain to which I have before adverted, and which was his sad companion through life. On entering his room to commence our reading, I could at once tell whether or not his night had been refreshing; for if it had, I found him at the table, the books to be studied ready, and a vacant chair set for me. If his night had been restless, and the pain still continued, I found him lying on the sofa, or more frequently upon three chairs, on which he could obtain an easier position. At such seasons, scarcely ever did a complaint issue from his lips; but inviting me to take the sofa, our reading commenced. They, however, who knew Mr. Hall can conjecture how often, if he became interested, he would raise himself from the chairs, utter a few animated expressions, and then resume the favorite reclining posture. Sometimes, when he was suffering more than usual, he proposed a walk in the fields, where, with the appropriate book as our companion, we could pursue the subject. If _he_ was the preceptor, as was commonly the case in these peripatetic lectures, he soon lost the sense of pain, and it was difficult to say whether the body or the mind were brought most upon the stretch in keeping up with him.

"During the early months of the year 1803, the pain in Mr. Hall's back increased both in intenseness and continuity, depriving him almost always of refreshing sleep, and depressing his spirits to an unusual degree.

"Often has he been known to sit close at his reading, or yet more intently engaged in abstract thought, for more than twelve hours in the day; so that when his friends have called upon him, in the hope of drawing him from his solitude, they have found him in such a state of nervous excitement as led them to unite their efforts in persuading him to take some mild narcotic and retire to rest. The painful result may be anticipated. This noble mind lost its equilibrium.

"Throughout the whole of Mr. Hall's residence at Leicester, he suffered much from his constitutional complaint; and neither his habit of smoking nor that of taking laudanum seemed effectually to alleviate his sufferings. It was truly surprising that this constant, severe pain, and the means adopted to mitigate it, did not in any measure diminish his mental energy.

"In 1812 he took from fifty to one hundred drops every night. Before 1826 the quantity had increased to one thousand drops.

"Mr. Hall commonly retired to rest a little before eleven o'clock; but after his first sleep, which lasted about two hours, he quitted his bed to obtain an easier position on the floor or upon three chairs, and would then employ himself in reading the book on which he had been engaged during the day. Sometimes, indeed often, the laudanum, large as the doses had become, did not sufficiently neutralize his pain to remove the necessity for again quitting his bed. For more than twenty years he had not been able to pass a whole night in bed. When this is borne in mind it is truly surprising that he wrote and published so much; nay, that he did not sink into dotage before he was fifty years of age.

"Early on the Sunday morning (Mr. Addington says) being requested to see him, I found him in a condition of extreme suffering and distress. The pain in his back had been uncommonly severe during the whole night, and compelled him to multiply at very short intervals the doses of his anodyne, until he had taken no less than 125 grains of solid opium, equal to more than 3000 drops, or nearly four ounces of laudanum!! This was the only instance in which I had ever seen him at all overcome by the soporific quality of the medicine; and it was even then hard to determine whether the effect was owing so much to the quantity administered as to the unusual circumstance of its not having proved, even for a short time, an effectual antagonist to the pain it was expected to relieve.

"The opium having failed to assuage his pain, he was compelled to remain in the horizontal posture; but while in this situation a violent attack in his chest took place, which in its turn rendered an upright position of the body no less indispensable. The struggle that ensued between these opposing and alike urgent demands became most appalling, and it was difficult to imagine that he could survive it, especially as from the extreme prostration of vital energy, the remedy by which the latter of these affections had often been mitigated-- viz., bleeding--could not be resorted to. Powerful stimulants, such as brandy, opium, ether, and ammonia, were the only resources, and in about an hour from my arrival we had the satisfaction of finding him greatly relieved."

The following references to the opium habits of Hall are found in "Gilfillan's Literary Portraits."

"Owing to a pain in his spine, he was obliged to swallow daily great quantities of ether and laudanum, not to speak of his favorite potion, tea. This had the effect of keeping him strung up always to the highest pitch; and, while never intoxicated, he was everlastingly excited. Had he been a feeble man in body and mind the regimen would have totally unnerved him. As it was, it added greatly to the natural brilliance of his conversational powers, although sometimes it appears to have irritated his temper, and to have provoked ebullitions of passion, and hasty, unguarded statements.

"A gentleman in Bradford described to us a day he once spent there with Hall. It was a day of much enjoyment and excitement. At the close of it Hall felt exceedingly exhausted, and on retiring to rest asked the landlady for a wine-glass half full of brandy. 'Now,' he says, 'I am about to take as much laudanum as would kill all this company; for if I don't, I won't sleep one moment.' He filled the glass with strong laudanum, went to bed, and enjoyed a refreshing rest."

JOHN RANDOLPH.

The eccentricities of no man in America who has been at all conspicuous in public life approach the eccentricities of the late John Randolph of Roanoke. Diseased from his birth, with a temperament of the most excitable kind, he seems during the greater part of his days to have lived only just without the bounds of confirmed insanity. His constitutional infirmities were peculiarly the infirmities that find relief in opium; and it has generally been understood that his addiction to the habit was of many years' continuance and lasted to his death. I have been assured by a Virginia gentleman that when, in one of his last days, he directed his servant to write upon a card for his inspection the word "REMORSE," Randolph was understood to have in mind his excessive use of opium. His biographer, Mr. Hugh Garland, however, has given apparently as little prominence to his habit in this respect as was consistent with any mention of it whatever. The letters which follow contain nearly all the information that we can gather from this source. Under date of February, 1817, Randolph says:

"The worst night that I have had since my indisposition commenced. It was, I believe, a case of _croup_ combined with the affection of the liver and the lungs. Nor was it unlike tetanus, since the muscles of the neck and back were rigid, and the jaw locked. I never expected, when the clock struck two, to hear the bell again. Fortunately, as I found myself going, I dispatched a servant (about one) to the apothecary for an ounce of laudanum. Some of this, poured down my throat, through my teeth, restored me to something like life. I was quite delirious, but had method in my madness; for they tell me I ordered Juba to load my gun and to shoot the first 'doctor' that should enter the room; adding, 'they are only mustard-seed, and will serve just to sting him.' Last night I was again very sick; but the anodyne relieved me. I am now persuaded that I might have saved myself a great deal of suffering by the moderate use of opium."

Under date of March of the same year he writes to a friend: "No mitigation of my worst symptoms took place until the third day of my journey, when I threw physic to the dogs, and instead of opium, etc., I drank, in defiance of my physician's prescription, copiously of cold spring water, and ate plentifully of ice. Since that change of regimen my strength has increased astonishingly, and I have even gained some flesh, or rather skin."

In a letter to Dr. Brockenbrough, dated May 30, 1828:

"I write again to tell you that extremity of suffering has driven me to the use of what I have had a horror all my life--I mean opium--and I have derived more relief from it than I could have anticipated. I took it to mitigate severe pain, and to check the diarrhea. It has done both; but to my surprise it has had an equally good effect upon my cough, which now does not disturb me in the night, and the diarrhea seldom until toward day-break, and then not over two or three times before breakfast, instead of two or three-and-thirty times.

His biographer, speaking of the state of his health in the autumn of 1831, says, "Mr. Randolph made no secret of his use of opium at this time: 'I live by if not upon opium,' said he to a friend. He had been driven to it as an alleviation of a pain to which few mortals were doomed. He could not now dispense with its use. 'I am fast sinking,' said he, 'into an opium-eating sot, but, please God! I will shake off the incubus yet before I die; for whatever difference of opinion may exist on the subject of suicide, there can be none as to _rushing into the presence of our Creator_ in a state of drunkenness, whether produced by opium or brandy.' To the deleterious influence of that poisonous drug may be traced many of the aberrations of mind and of conduct so much regretted by his friends during the ensuing winter and spring. But he was by no means under its constant influence."

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE.

So little is known, beyond what appears in the following brief notices, of the opium habits of this distinguished philanthropist, that their citation here would be of little service to opium-eaters, except as they tend to show that the regular use of the drug in small quantities may sometimes be continued for many years without apparent injury to the health, while the same difficulty in abandoning it is experienced as attends its disuse by those whose moderation has been less marked.

The son of Wilberforce, in the "Life" of his distinguished father, says: "His returning health was in a great measure the effect of a proper use of opium, a remedy to which even Dr. Pitcairne's judgment could scarcely make him have recourse; yet it was to this medicine that he now owed his life, as well as the comparative vigor of his later years. So sparing was he always in its use, that as a stimulant he never knew its power, and as a remedy for his specific weakness he had not to increase its quantity during the last twenty years he lived. 'If I take,' he would often say,'but a single glass of wine, I can feel its effect, but I never know when I have taken my dose of opium by my feelings.' Its intermission was too soon perceived by the recurrence of disorder."

In a letter from Dr. Gilman, already quoted in the "Reminiscences of Coleridge," he says, speaking of the difficulty of leaving off opium, "I had heard of the failure of Mr. Wilberforce's case under an eminent physician of Bath," etc.

A HALF CENTURY'S USE OF OPIUM.

The case of Wilberforce, however, is thrown into the shade by that of a gentleman now living in New York, whose use of opium has been much more protracted than that of the British philanthropist, and who affirms that opium, instead of weakening his powers of mind or body in any respect, has, on the contrary, been of eminent service to both. The compiler would have been glad, in the general interests of humanity, to omit any reference to this case; but it is a legitimate part of the story he has undertaken to tell; and however this isolated exception to the ordinary results of the opium habit may be perverted as a snare and delusion to others, it can not honestly remain untold. In the compiler's interview with this gentleman, now in the one hundred and third year of his age, he was impressed with the evidences of a physical and mental vigor, and a high moral tone, which is rarely found in men upon whom rests the weight of even eighty years. Whatever may be thought of the convictions of the compiler, as to the enormity of the injury inflicted upon society from the habitual and increasing use of opium, he can not reconcile it to his sense of fairness to omit distinct reference to this most anomalous case. The gentleman in question was born in England in the year 1766, and received his first commission in the army in 1786. Serving his country in almost every military station in the world where the martial drum of England is heard--in India, at the Cape, in the Canadas, on guard over Napoleon at St. Helena--he illustrates, as almost a solitary exception, the fact that a use of opium for half a century, varying in quantity from forty grains daily to many times this amount, does not _inevitably_ impair bodily health, mental vigor, or the higher qualities of the moral nature. The use of opium was commenced by this gentleman in the year 1816, as a relief for a severe attack of rheumatism, and has been continued to the present time, with the exception of a very brief period when an eminent physician of Berlin, at the suggestion of the late Chevalier Bunsen, the Prussian Embassador to Great Britain, endeavored to break up the habit. In this effort he was unsuccessful, and the case remains as a striking illustration of the weakness of that physiological reasoning which would deduce certain phenomena as the invariable consequences of a violation of the fundamental laws of health. Until the chemistry of the living body is better understood, medical science seems obliged to accept many anomalies which it can not explain. About all that can be said of such exceptional cases is this: In the great conflagrations which at times devastate large cities, some huge mass of solid masonry is occasionally seen in the midst of the wide-spread ruin, looking down upon prostrate columns, broken capitals, shattered walls, and the cinders and ashes of a general desolation. The solitary tower unquestionably stands; but its chief utility lies in this,--that it serves as a striking monument of the appalling and wide-spread destruction to which it is the sole and conspicuous exception.

WHAT SHALL THEY DO TO BE SAVED?

Most of the preceding pages were already prepared for the press, when the attention of the compiler was attracted by a very remarkable article in _Harper's Magazine_ for August, 1867, entitled, "What Shall They Do to be Saved?" The graphic vividness of the story, as well as the profound insight and wide experience with which it was written, led me to solicit from the unknown author the addition of it to the pages of my own book. It proved to be from the pen of Fitz Hugh Ludlow, already recognized by the public as a writer of eminence, both in science and letters. The permission being freely accorded, I was still further moved to ask that he would give me a statement of the method pursued by him in dealing with the class to which it refers. The letter following his article was his response to my request. It will be seen to contain an outline of his views upon the subject to which he has devoted some years of study and practice, and is especially valuable as embodying the germ of a plan by which, according to his growing conviction, the opium-eater can alone be saved. As the conclusions of a writer who seems to the compiler to be singularly intelligent and definite in his knowledge of this most interesting and difficult field of disease and treatment, it needs no further recommendation to the attention of the reader. Since the publication of his August article, a multitude of letters received from all portions of the country, asking his advice and assistance in such cases as this book describes, has left a profound conviction upon his mind of the most crying need of the establishment of an institution where opium-eaters can be treated specially. In this view of the urgent necessities of the case, the compiler most heartily and earnestly concurs.

* * * * *

I have just returned from forty-eight hours' friendly and professional attendance at a bedside where I would fain place every young person in this country for a single hour before the Responsibilities of Life have become the sentinels and Habit the jailer of his Will.

My patient was a gentleman of forty, who for several years of his youth occasionally used opium, and for the last eight has habitually taken it. During these eight years he has made at least three efforts to leave it off, in each instance diminishing his dose gradually for a month before its entire abandonment, and in the most successful one holding the enemy at bay for but a single summer. In two cases he had no respite of agony from the moment he dropped till he resumed it. In the third case, a short period of comparative repose succeeded the first fiery battle, but in the midst of felicitations on his victory he was attacked by the most agonizing hemicranial headaches (resulting from what I now fear to have been already permanent disorganization of the stomach), and went back to his nepenthe in a state of almost suicidal despair, only after the torture had continued for weeks without a moment's mitigation.

He had first learned its seductions, as happens with the vast majority of Anglo-Saxon opium-eaters, through a medical prescription. An attack of inflamed cornea was treated with caustic applications, and the pain assuaged by internal doses of M'Munn's Elixir. When my friend came out of his dark room and bandages at the end of a month he had consumed twenty ounces of this preparation, whose probable distinction from the tincture known as laudanum I point out below in the note. [Footnote: Mr. Frank A. Schlitz has kindly made for me a special analysis of M'Munn's Elixir, which seems to prove that the process of its preparation amounts to more than the _denarcotization_ of opium, which is spoken of on the wrapper of each vial. As nearly as can be ascertained, M'Munn's Elixir is simply an aqueous infusion of opium--procured by the ordinary maceration--and preserved from decomposing by the subsequent addition of a small portion of alcohol. _Narcotin_ being absolutely insoluble in water is eliminated as the circular says. This fact alone would not account for the difference between its action and that of laudanum. This is explained by the fact that all the other alkaloids possess diverse rates of solubility in water, and exist in M'Munn's Elixir in very different relative proportions from those which they bear to each other in the alcoholic tincture called laudanum.] Here it may not be superfluous to say that the former preparation has all the essential properties of the latter, save certain of the constipatory and stupefying tendencies which, by a private process known to the assigns of the inventor, have been so masked or removed that it possesses in many cases an availableness which the practitioner can not despise, though compelled by the secrecy of its formula to rank it among quack medicines. The amount of it which my friend had taken during his month's eclipse represents an ounce of dry gum opium--in rough measurement a piece as large as a French billiard ball. I thus particularize because he had never previously been addicted to the drug; had inherited a sound constitution, and differed from any other fresh subject only in the intensity of his nervous temperament. I wish to emphasize the fact that the system of a mere neophyte, with nothing to neutralize the effects of the drug save the absorbency, so to speak, of the pain for which it was given, could so rapidly adapt itself to them as to demand an increase of the dose in such an alarming ratio. There are certain men to whom opium is as fire to tow, and my friend was one of these. On the first of October he sensibly perceived the trifling dose of fifty drops; on the first of November he was taking, without increased sensation, an ounce vial of "M'Munn" daily.

From that time--totally ignorant of the terrible trap which lay grinning under the bait he dabbled with--he continued to take opium at short intervals for several years. When by the physician's orders he abandoned "M'Munn," on the subsidence of the eye-difficulty, his symptoms were uneasy rather than distressing, and disappeared after a few days' oppression at the pit of the stomach and a few nights' troubled dreaming. But he had not forgotten the sweet dissolving views at midnight, the great executive achievements at noonday, the heavenly sense of a self-reliance which dare go anywhere, say any thing, attempt any thing in the world. He had not forgotten the nonchalance under slight, the serenity in pain, the apathy to sorrow, which for one month set him calm as Boodh in the temple-splendors of his darkened room. He had not forgotten that the only perfect _peace_ he had ever experienced was there, and he remembered that peace as something which seemed to blend all the assuaged passion and confirmed dignity of old age with that energy of high emprise which thrills the nerves of manhood. He had tasted as many sources of earthly pleasure as any man I ever knew; but the ecstasies of form and color, wine, Eros, music, perfume, all the luxuries of surrounding which wealth could purchase or high-breeding appreciate, were as nothing to him in comparison with the memory of that time on which his family threw away their sympathy when they called it his "month of _suffering."_