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The Opium Habit

by Horace B. Day · English · Gutenberg #7293 · 635,778 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Opium Habit

Author: Horace B. Day


        
Release date: January 1, 2005 [eBook #7293]
                Most recently updated: December 30, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7293

Credits: Produced by David Maddock, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OPIUM HABIT ***




Produced by David Maddock, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team





THE OPIUM HABIT,

WITH

SUGGESTIONS AS TO THE REMEDY.


"After my death, I earnestly entreat that a full and unqualified
narrative of my wretchedness, and of its guilty cause, may be made
public, that at least some little good may be effected by the direful
example."--COLERIDGE.




CONTENTS


INTRODUCTION

A SUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT TO ABANDON OPIUM

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--WILLIAM WILBERFORCE

WHAT SHALL THEY DO TO BE SAVED?

OUTLINES OF THE OPIUM-CURE



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 the _dicta_ of 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 a _maximum_ beyond
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-descending _gradus_ which 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 mere
_bagatelle_, 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 the _vis vitae_ had 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 American
_Marseillaise_.

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.

In the entire week from Christmas to New Year's the progress in
abandonment of opium was but a single grain. I am sure there was no
want of resolution at this trying time.  Day by day I exhausted all my
resources in the vain endeavor to get on with half, three-quarters,
even seven-eighths of a grain; but moans and groans, and biting the
tongue till the blood came, as it repeatedly did, would not carry me
over the twenty-four hours without the full grain. It seemed as if
tortured nature would collapse under any further effort to bring the
matter to a final issue.

Brandy and bitters after a few day's use had been abandoned, under the
apprehension that they were connected with the tendency to internal
inflammation which I have noticed as possibly affecting the brain. For
a day or two I resorted to ale, but a disagreeable sweetness about it
induced the substitution of Schenck beer, a weak kind of
_lager_. This I found satisfied the craving for a bitter liquid,
and it became for two or three weeks my chief drink. I should have
mentioned that the day subsequent to the disuse of tobacco I had also
given up tea and coffee, partly from a disposition to test the
strength of my resolution, and partly from the belief that they might
have some connection with a constant sensation in the mouth as if
salivated with mercury. I soon learned that the real difficulty lay in
the liver, and that this organ is powerfully affected in persons
abandoning the long-continued use of opium. Had I known this fact at
an earlier day it would have been of service in teaching me to control
the diseased longing for rich and highly-seasoned food which had now
become a passion. Eat as much as I would, however, the sense of hunger
never left me; and this diseased craving, in ignorance of its
injurious effects, was gratified in a way that might have taxed
unimpaired powers of digestion.

At length the long-anticipated New Year's Day, on which I was to be
emancipated forever from the tyranny of opium, arrived. For five weeks
of such steady suffering as the wealth of all the world would not
induce me to encounter a second time, I had kept my eye steadily fixed
upon this day as the beginning of a new life. This was also the day on
which I was to dine with my friend. As the dinner-hour approached it
became evident that no opium meant no dinner, and a little later, that
dinner or no dinner the opium was still a necessity.  A half grain I
thought might carry me through the day, but in this I was mistaken. As
I lay upon my friend's sofa, suffering from a strange medley of
hunger, pain, and weakness, it seemed that years must elapse before
the system could regain its tone or the bodily sensations become at
all endurable. Soon after dinner I felt obliged to take another
half-grain. My humiliation in failing to triumph when and how I had
resolved to do, was excessive. In spite of the strongest resolutions,
I was still an opium-eater. I somehow felt that after all I had gone
through I ought, to have succeeded.  I was in no mood to speculate
about the causes of the failure; it was enough to know that I had
failed, and what was worse, that apparently nothing whatever had been
gained in the last four days. While I certainly felt no temptation to
give in, I thought it possible that some of the functions of the body,
from the long use of opium, might have completely lost their powers of
normal action, and that I should be obliged to continue a very
moderate use of the drug during the remainder of my life. I saw, in
dismal perspective, that small fractional part of the opium of years
which was now represented by a single grain, looming up in endless
distance, not unlike that puzzling metaphysical necessity in the
perpetual subdivision of a unit, which, carried as far as it may be,
always leaves a final half undisposed of.  But in this I did myself
injustice. I had really gained much in these few days, and the proof
of it lay in the use of but half a grain on the day which succeeded
New Year's. The third day of January, greatly to my surprise, a
quarter-grain I found carried me through the twenty-four hours with
apparently some slight remission of suffering.

As I now look back upon it, the worst of the experiment lay in the
three weeks intervening between the 10th and the 31st of December. So
far as mere pain of body was concerned, there was little to choose
between the agony of one day and another; but the apprehension that
insanity might set in, certainly aggravated the distress of the later
stages of the trial. When a man knows that he is practicing
self-control to the very utmost, and holding himself up steadily to
his work in spite of the gravest discouragements, the consciousness
that a large vacuum is being gradually formed in his brain is not
exhilarating.

The next day--to me a very memorable one--the fourth of January, I sat
for most of the day rocking backward and forward on a sofa or a chair,
speaking occasionally a few words in a low sepulchral voice, but with
the one bitter feeling, penetrating my whole nature, that come what
would, on that day _I would not_.

When the clock struck twelve at midnight, and I knew that for the
first time in many years I had lived for an entire day without opium,
it excited no surprise or exultation.  The capacity for an emotion of
any kind was exhausted. I seemed as little capable of a sentiment as a
man well could be, this side of his winding-sheet. I knew, of course,
that in these forty days save one, I had worked out the problem, How
to leave off opium, and that I had apparently attained a final
deliverance: but it was several weeks before I appreciated with any
confidence the completion of the task I had undertaken.

Although the opium habit was broken, it was only to leave me in a
condition of much feebleness and suffering.  I could not sleep, I
could not sit quietly, I could not lie in any one posture for many
minutes together. The nervous system was thoroughly deranged. Weak as
I had become, I felt a continual desire to walk. The weather was
unfavorable, but I managed to get several miles of exercise almost
daily. But this relief was limited to four or five hours at most, and
left the remainder of the day a weary weight upon my hands. The
aversion to reading had become such that some months elapsed before I
took up a book with any pleasure. Even the daily papers were more than
I could well fix my attention upon, except in the briefest and most
cursory way. Within a week, however, the sense of acute pain rapidly
diminished, but the irritability, impatience, and incapacity to do any
thing long remained unrelieved. The disordered liver became apparently
more disordered with the progress of time, producing such effects upon
the bowels as may with more fitness be told a physician than recorded
here. The tonsils of the throat were swollen, the throat itself
inflamed, while the chest was penetrated with what seemed like
pulsations of prickly heat. There was also a sense of fullness in the
muscles of the arms and legs which seemed to be permeated, if I may so
express it, with heated electricity. The general condition of the
nervous system will be sufficiently indicated by the statement that it
was between three or four months before I could hold a pen with any
degree of steadiness. Meantime, singular as it may seem, the
appearance of health and vigor had astonishingly increased. I had
gained more than twenty pounds in weight, partly, I suppose, the
result of leaving off opium and tobacco, and partly the consequence of
the insatiable appetite with which I was constantly followed. Within a
month after the close of the opium strife, I was repeatedly
congratulated upon my healthy, vigorous condition. Few men in the
entire city bore about them more of the appearance of perfect health,
and fewer still were probably in such a state of exhausted vitality.

During the time I was leaving off opium I had labored under the
impression that the habit once mastered, a speedy restoration to
health would follow. I was by no means prepared, therefore, for the
almost inappreciable gain in the weeks which succeeded, and in some
anxiety consulted a number of physicians, who each suggested in a
timid way the trial, some of strychnine, some of valerian, some of
lupuline, hyoscyamus, ignatia, belladonna, and what not. I do not know
that I derived the slightest benefit from any of these prescriptions,
or from any other therapeutic agency, unless I except the good effects
for a few days of bitters, and of cold shower-baths from a tank in
which ice was floating.

The most judicious of the medical gentlemen whose aid I invoked, was,
I think, the one who replied to my inquiry for his bill, "What for? I
have done you no good, and have learned more from you than you have
from me."

This constitutes the entire history of my medical experience, and is
mentioned as being the only, and a very small adjunct to the great
remedy--patient, persistent, obstinate endurance. So exceeding slow
has been the process toward the restoration of a natural condition of
the system, that writing now, at the expiration of more than a year
since opium was finally abandoned, it seems to me very uncertain when,
if ever, this result will be reached. Between four and five months
elapsed before I was at all capable of commanding my attention or
controlling the nervous impatience of mind and body. I then assented
to a proposal which involved the necessity of a good deal of steady
work, in the hope that constant occupation would divert the attention
from the nervousness under which I suffered and would restore the
self-reliance which had so long failed me. It was a foolish
experiment, and might have proved a fatal one. The business I had
undertaken required a clear head and average health, and I had
neither. The sleep was short and imperfect, rarely exceeding two or
three hours. The chest was in a constant heat and very sore, while the
previous bilious difficulties seemed in no way overcome. The mouth was
parched, the tongue swollen, and a low fever seemed to have taken
entire possession of the system, with special and peculiar
exasperations in the muscles of the arms and legs.

The difficulty of thinking to any purpose was only equalled by the
reluctance with which I could bring myself to the task of holding a
pen. For a few weeks, however, the necessity of not wholly disgracing
myself forced me on after a poor fashion; but at the end of two months
I was a used-up man. I would sit for hours looking listlessly upon a
sheet of paper, helpless of originating an idea upon the commonest of
subjects, and with a prevailing sensation of owning a large emptiness
in the brain, which seemed chiefly filled with a stupid wonder when
all this would end.

More than an entire year has now passed, in which I have done little
else than to put the preceding details into shape from brief memoranda
made at the time of the experiment.  While the physical agony ceased
almost immediately after the opium was abandoned, the irritation of
the system still continues. I do not know how better to describe my
present state than by the use of language which professional men may
regard as neither scientific nor accurate, but which will express, I
hope, to unprofessional readers the idea I wish to convey, when I say
that the entire system seems to me not merely to have been poisoned,
but saturated with poison.  Had some virus been transfused into the
blood, which carried with it to every nerve of sensation a sense of
painful, exasperating unnaturalness, the feeling would not, I imagine,
be unlike what I am endeavoring to indicate.

ADDENDA.--At the time of writing the preceding narrative I had
supposed that the entire story was told, and that the intelligent
reader, should this record ever see the light, would naturally infer,
as I myself imagined would be the case, that the unnatural condition
of the body would soon become changed into a state of average
health. In this I was mistaken. So tenacious and obstinate in its hold
upon its victim is the opium disease, that even after the lapse of ten
years its poisonous agency is still felt. Without some reference to
these remoter consequences of the hasty abandonment of confirmed
habits of opium-eating, the chief object of this narrative as a guide
to others (who will certainly need all the information on the subject
that can be given them) would fail of being secured. While
unquestionably the heaviest part of the suffering resulting from such
a change of habit belongs to the few weeks in which the patient is
abandoning opium, it ought not to be concealed that this brief period
by no means comprises the limit within which he will find himself
obliged to maintain the most rigid watch over himself, lest the
feeling of desperation which at times assaults him from the hope of
immediate physical restoration disappointed and indefinitely
postponed, should drive him back to his old habits. Indeed, with some
temperaments, the greatest danger of a relapse comes in, not during
the process of abandonment, but after the habit has been broken. Great
bodily pain serves only to rouse up some natures to a more earnest
strife, and, as their sufferings become more intense, the
determination not to yield gains an unnatural strength. The mind is
vindicating itself as the master of the body. While in this state,
tortures and the fagot are powerless to extort groans or confessions
from the racked or half-consumed martyr. Many a sufferer has borne the
agony of the boots or the thumb-screw without flinching, whose courage
has given way under the less painful but more unendurable punishment
of prolonged imprisonment.  In the one case all a man's powers of
resistance are roused; he feels that his manhood is at stake, and he
endures as men will endure when they see that the question how far
they are their own masters, is at issue. There are, I think, a great
number of men and women who would go unflinchingly to the stake in
vindication of a principle, whose resolution, somewhere in the course
of a long, solitary, and indefinite imprisonment, would break down
into a discreditable compromise of opinions for which they were
unquestionably willing to die.

In the same way a man will for a time endure even frightful suffering
in relinquishing a pernicious habit, while he may fail to hold up his
determination against the assaults of the apparently never-ending
irritation, discomfort, pain, and sleeplessness which may be counted
on as being, sometimes at least, among the remoter consequences of the
struggle in which he has engaged. I wish it, however, distinctly
understood that I do not suppose that the experience of others whose
use of opium had been similar to my own, would necessarily correspond
to mine in all or even in many respects.  Opium is the Proteus of
medicine, and science has not yet succeeded in tearing away the many
masks it wears, nor in tracing the marvellously diversified aspects it
is capable of assuming. Among many cases of the relinquishment of
opium with which I have been made acquainted, nothing is more
perplexing than the difference of the specific consequences, as they
are exhibited in persons of different temperaments and habits. For
such differences I do not pretend to account. That is the business of
the thoroughly educated physician, and no unprofessional man, however
wide his personal experience, has the right to dogmatize or even to
express with much confidence settled opinions upon the subject.  My
object will be fully attained if I succeed in giving a just and
truthful impression of the more marked final consequences of the hasty
disuse of opium in this single case, leaving it to medical men to
explain the complicated relations of an opium-saturated constitution
to the free and healthy functions of life.

In my own case, the most marked among the later consequences of the
disease of opium, some of which remain to the present time and seem to
be permanently engrafted upon the constitution, have been these:

1. Pressure upon the muscles of the limbs and in the extremities,
sometimes as of electricity apparently accumulated there under a
strong mechanical force.

2. A disordered condition of the liver, exhibiting itself in the
variety of uncomfortable modes in which that organ, when acting
irregularly, is accustomed to assert its grievances.

3. A sensitive condition of the stomach, rejecting many kinds of food
which are regarded by medical men as simple and easy of digestion.

4. Acute shooting pains, confined to no one part of the body.

5. An unnatural sensitiveness to cold.

6. Frequent cold perspiration in parts of the body.

7. A tendency to impatience and irritability of temper, with paroxysms
of excitement wholly foreign to the natural disposition.

8. Deficiency and irregularity of sleep.

9. Occasional prostration of strength.

10. Inaptitude for steady exertion.

I mention without hesitancy these consequences of the abandonment of
opium, from the belief that any person really in earnest in his desire
to relinquish the habit will be more likely to persevere by knowing at
the start exactly what obstacles he may meet in his progress toward
perfect recovery, than by having it gradually revealed to him, and
that at times when his body and mind are both enfeebled by what he has
passed through. With a single exception, the dismost serious one I
have been obliged to encounter. Whether it is one of the specific
effects of the disuse of opium, or only one of the many general
results of a disordered constitution, I do not know.

I can only say in my own case, that after the lapse of years, this
particular difficulty is not wholly overcome. This electric condition,
so to call it, still continues a serious annoyance. But when it
occurs, the pain is of less duration, and gradually, but very slowly,
is of diminished frequency. Violent exercise will sometimes relieve
it; a long walk has often the same effect. The use of stimulants
brings alleviation for a time, but there seems to be no permanent
remedy except in the perfect restoration of the system by time from
this effect of the wear and tear of opium upon the nerves.
Irregularity in the action of the liver, while singularly marked
in the earlier stages of the experiment, and continuing for years
to make its agency manifestly felt, is in a considerable degree
checked and controlled by a judicious use of calomel.

The condition of the digestive organs is less impaired than I should
have supposed possible, judging from the experience of others. A
moderate degree of attention to the quality of what is eaten, with
proper care to avoid what is not easily digested, with the exercise of
habitual self-control in respect to quantity, suffices to prevent, for
the most part, all unendurable feelings of discomfort in this part of
the system.  Whether the habitually febrile condition of the mouth,
and the swollen state of the tongue, is referable to a disturbed
action of the stomach or of the liver I can not say. It is certain
that none of the effects of opium-eating are more marked or more
obstinately tenacious in their hold upon the system than these. I
barely advert to the frequent impossibility of retaining some kinds of
food upon the stomach, which has been one unpleasant part of my
experience, because I doubt whether this return of a difficulty which
began in childhood has any necessary connection with the use of
opium. For many years before I knew any thing of the drug I had been a
daily sufferer from this cause. Indeed the use of opium seemed to
control this tendency, and it was only when the remedy was abandoned
that the old annoyance returned. For a few months the stomach rejected
every kind of food; but in less than a year, and subsequently to the
present time, this has been of only occasional ocurrence.

I am also at a loss how far to connect the disuse of opium with the
lancinating pains which have troubled me since the time to which I
refer. These pains began long before I had recourse to opium, they did
not cease their frequent attacks while opium was used, nor have they
failed to make their potency felt since opium was abandoned. While it
is not improbable that the neuralgic difficulties of my childhood
might have remained to the present time, even if I had never made use
of opium, I think that the experience of all who have undergone the
trial shows that similar pains are invariably attendant upon the
disuse of opium.  How long their presence might be protracted with
persons not antecedently troubled in this way, is a question I can not
answer. I infer from what little has been recorded, and from what I
have learned in other ways, that the reforming opium-eater must make
up his mind to a protracted encounter with this great enemy to his
peace. That the struggle of others with this difficulty will be
prolonged as mine has been I do not believe, unless they have been
subjected for a lifetime to pains connected with disorder in the
nervous system.

The unnatural sensitiveness to cold to which I have alluded is rather
a discomfort than any thing else. It merely makes a higher temperature
necessary for enjoyment, but in no other respect can it be regarded as
deserving special mention.  With the thermometer standing at 80° to
85° the sensation of agreeable warmth is perfect; with the mercury at
70° or even higher, there is a good deal of the feeling that the bones
are inadequately protected by the flesh, that the clothing is too
limited in quantity, and in winter that the coal-dealer is hardly
doing you justice.

The cold perspiration down the spine, which was so marked a sensation
during the worst of the trial, has not yet wholly left the system, but
is greatly limited in the extent of surface it affects and in the
frequency of its return.

The tendency to impatience and irritability of temper to which I have
adverted is by far the most humiliating of the effects resulting from
the abandonment of opium. Men differ very widely both in their
liability to these excesses of temper as well as in their power to
control them; but under the aggravations which necessarily attend an
entire change of habit, this natural tendency, whether it be small or
great, to hastiness of mind is greatly increased. So long as the
disturbing causes remain, whether these be the state of the liver or
the stomach, or a want of sufficient sleep, or the excited condition
of the nervous system, the patient will find himself called upon for
the exercise of all his self-control to keep in check his exaggerated
sensibility to the daily annoyances of life.

Intimately connected with the preceding is the frequent recurrence of
sleepless nights, which seem invariably to attend upon the abandonment
of the habit. Possibly some part of this state of agitated wakefulness
may pertain to the natural temperament of the patient, but this
tendency is greatly aggravated by the condition of the nerves, so
thoroughly shattered by the violent struggle to oblige the system to
dispense with the soothing influence of the drug upon which it has so
long relied. Whatever method others may have found to counteract this
infirmity, I have been able as yet to find no remedy for
it. Especially are those nights made long and weary which
_precede_ any long continuance of wet weather.  A moist condition
of the atmosphere still serves the double purpose of setting in play
the nervous sensibilities, and, as a concomitant or a consequence, of
greatly disturbing, if not destroying sleep.

In connection with this matter something should be said on the subject
of dreaming, to which De Quincey has given so marked a prominence in
his "Confessions" and "Suspiris de Profundis." In my own case, neither
when beginning the use of opium, nor while making use of it in the
largest quantities and after the habit had long been established, nor
while engaged in the painful process of relinquishing it, nor at any
time subsequently, have I had any experience worth narrating of the
influence of the drug over the dreaming faculty.  On the contrary, I
doubt whether many men of mature age know so little of this peculiar
state of mind as myself.  The conditions in this respect, imposed by
my own peculiarities of constitution, have been either no sleep
sufficiently sound as to interfere with the consciousness of what was
passing, or mere restlessness, or sleep so profound as to leave behind
it no trace of the mind's activity. While it is therefore certain that
this exaggeration of the dreaming faculty is not necessarily connected
with the use of opium, but is rather to be referred to some
peculiarity of temperament or organization in De Quincey himself, I
find myself in turn at a loss to know how far to regard other
phenomena to which I have previously alluded as the natural and
necessary consequences of opium, or how far they may be owing to
peculiarities of constitution in myself. Opium-eaters have said but
little on the subject. The medical profession, so far as I have
conversed with them, and I have consulted with some of the most
eminent, are not generally well informed on any thing beyond the
specific effects of the drug as witnessed in ordinary medication. In
the absence of sufficient authority, it may be safer to say that the
remoter consequences of the disuse of opium consist in a general
disorder and derangement of the nervous system, exhibiting itself in
such particular symptoms as are most accordant with the temperament,
constitutional weaknesses, and personal idiosyncrasies of the
patient. That some considerable suffering must be regarded as
unavoidable seems to be placed beyond question from the nature of the
trial to which the body has been subjected, as well as from what
little has been said on the subject by those who have relinquished the
habit.

I close this brief reference to the remoter consequences of the habits
of the opium-eater by calling the attention of the reader to the
physical weakness with consequent inaptitude for continuous exertion
which forms a part of my own experience. Unable as I am to refer it to
any _immediate_ cause, frequent and sudden prostration of
strength occurs, accompanied by slight dizziness, impaired sight, and
a sense of overwhelming weakness, though never going to the extent of
absolute faintness. Its recurrence seems to be governed by no rule. It
sometimes comes with great frequency, and sometimes weeks will elapse
without a return. Neither the state of the weather, nor any particular
condition of the body, appears to call it out. It sometimes is
relieved by a glass of water, by the entrance of a stranger, by the
very slightest excitement, and it sometimes resists the strongest
stimulants and every other attempt to combat it. I can record nothing
else respecting this visitant except that its presence is always
accompanied with a singular sensation in the stomach, and that the
entire nervous system is affected by its attack.

The inaptitude for steady exertion is not merely the consequence of
this occasional feeling of exhaustion, but is for a time the
inevitable result of the accumulated pain and weakness to which his
system, not yet restored to health, is still subject. This impatience
of continued application to work, which is common to all opium-eaters,
and which does not cease with the abandonment of the habit, seems to
result in the first case from some specific relation between the drug
and the meditative faculties, promoting a state of habitual reverie
and day-dreaming, utterly indisposing the opium-user for any
occupation which will disturb the calm current of his thoughts, and in
the other, proceeding from the direct disorder of the nervous
organization itself. Strange as it may seem, the very thought of
exertion will often waken in the reforming opium-eater acute nervous
pains, which cease only as the purpose is abandoned. In other cases,
where there is no special nervous suffering at the time, work is easy
and pleasant even beyond what is natural.

One effect of opium upon the _mind_ deserves to be mentioned; its
influence upon the faculty of memory. The logical memory, De Quincey
says, seems in no way to be weakened by its use, but rather the
contrary. His own devotion to the abstract principles of political
economy; the character of Coleridge's literary labors between the
years 1804-16, when his use of opium was most inordinate; together
with the cast of mind of many other well-known opium-eaters, confirms
this suggestion of De Quincey. His further statement that the memory
of dates, isolated events, and particular facts, is greatly weakened
by opium, is confirmed by my own experience. However physiologists may
explain this fact, a knowledge of it may not be without its use to
those who desire to be made thoroughly acquainted with all the
consequences of the opium habit.

If to these discomforts be added a prevailing tendency to a febrile
condition of body, together with permanent disorder in portions of the
secretory system, the catalogue of annoyances with which the
long-reformed opium-eater may have to contend is completed. This
statement is not made to exaggerate the suffering consequent upon the
disuse of opium, but is made on the ground that a full apprehension of
what the patient may be called upon to go through will best enable him
to make up his mind to one resolute, unflinching effort for the
redemption of himself from his bad habits.

So far as the body is concerned, there is much in my experience which
induces me to give a general assent to the opinion expressed by a
medical man of great reputation whom I repeatedly consulted in
reference to the discouraging slowness of my own restoration to
perfect health. "I can not see," he said, "that your constitution has
been permanently injured; but you were a great many years getting into
this state, and I think it will take nearly as many to get you out of
it."

It may not be amiss to add that those opium-eaters whose circumstances
exempt them from harassing cares, who meet only with kindness and
sympathy from friends, and who have resources for enjoyment within
themselves, have in respect to these subsequent inconveniences greatly
the advantage of those whose position and circumstances are less
fortunate.

These free and almost confidential personal statements have been made,
not without doing some violence to that instinctive sense of propriety
which prompts men to shrink from giving publicity to their weaknesses
and from the vanity of seeming to imply that their individual
experience of life is of special value to others. Leaving undecided
the question whether under any circumstances a departure from the
general rule of good sense and good taste in such matters is
justifiable, I have, nevertheless, done what I could to give to
opium-eaters a truthful statement of the consequences that may ensue
from their abandonment of the habit.  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; but when all impatience, unreasonableness,
weaknesses and vanities have been burned out of our natures by the
heat of suffering; when the resolution never falters to endure
patiently whatever may come in the endeavor to measure one's own case
justly, and exactly as it is; and when time has been allowed to exert
its legitimate influence in calming whatever has been disturbed and
correcting whatever has been prejudiced, a conscious strength is
developed far beyond what is natural to men possessed only of ordinary
powers of endurance. It is chiefly through patient waiting that the
confirmed victim of opium can look for relief. All who have made
heroic efforts to this end, and yet have failed in their attempt, have
done so through the absence of adequate confidence in the efficacy of
time to bring them relief. The _one_ lesson, however, which the
reforming opium-eater must learn is, never to relinquish any gain,
however slight, which he may make upon his bad habit.  Patience will
bring him relief at last, and though he may and will find his progress
continually thwarted and himself often tempted to give over the
contest in despair, he may be sure that year by year he is steadily
advancing to the perfect recovery of all that he has lost.

The opium-eater will not regard as amiss some few suggestions as to
the mode in which his habit may most easily be abandoned. The best
advice that can be given--the _only_ advice that will ever be
given by an opium-eater--is, never to begin the habit. The objection
at once occurs, both to the medical man and to the patient suffering
from extreme nervous disorder, What remedy then shall be given in
those numerous cases in which the protracted use of opium, laudanum,
or morphine is found necessary? The obvious answer is, that no medical
man ever intends to give this drug in such quantities or for so long a
time as to establish in the patient a confirmed habit. The frequent,
if not the usual history of confirmed opium-eaters is this: A
physician prescribes opium as an anodyne, and the patient finds from
its use the relief which was anticipated. Very frequently he finds not
merely that his pain has been relieved, but that with this relief has
been associated a feeling of positive, perhaps of extreme enjoyment. A
recurrence of the same pain infallibly suggests a recurrence to the
same remedy. The advice of the medical man is not invoked, because the
patient knows that morphine or laudanum was the simple remedy that
proved so efficacious before, and this he can procure as well without
as with the direction of his physician.  He becomes his own doctor,
prescribes the same remedy the medical man has prescribed, and charges
nothing for his advice. The resort to this pleasant medication after
no long time becomes habitual, and the patient finds that the remedy,
whose use he had supposed was sanctioned by his physician, has become
his tyrant. If patients exhibited the same reluctance to the
administration of opium that they do to drugs that are nauseous, if
the collateral effects of the former were no more pleasurable than
lobelia or castor oil, nothing more could be said against
self-medication in one case than the other. Opium-eaters are made
such, not by the physician's prescription of opium to patients in
whose cases its use is indispensable, but by their not giving together
with such prescriptions emphatic and earnest caution that the remedy
is not to be taken except when specially ordered, in consequence of
the hazard that a habit may be formed which it will be difficult to
break. Patients to whom it is regularly administered are not at first
generally aware how easily this habit is acquired, nor with what
difficulty it is relinquished, especially by persons of nervous
temperament and enfeebled health. The number of cases, I suspect, is
small in which the use of opium has become a necessity, where the
direction of a physician may not be pleaded as justifying its original
employment.

The object I have in view is not, however, so much to make suggestions
to medical men as it is to awaken in the victims of opium the feeling
that they can master the tyrant by such acts of resolution, patience,
and self-control as most men are fully capable of exhibiting. Certain
conditions, however, seem to be the almost indispensable preliminaries
to success in relinquishing opium by those who have been _long_
habituated to its use. The first and most important of these is a firm
conviction on the part of the patient that the task can be
accomplished. Without this he can do nothing.  The narratives given in
this volume show its entire practicability. In addition to this, it
should be remembered that these experiments were most of them made in
the absence of any sufficient guidance, from the experience of others,
as to the method and alleviations with which the task can be
accomplished. A second condition necessary to success, is sufficient
physical health, with sufficient firmness of character to undergo, as
a matter of course, the inevitable suffering of the body, and to
resist the equally inevitable temptation to the mind to give up the
strife under some paroxysm of impatience, or in some moment of dark
despondency. With a very moderate share of vigor of constitution, and
with a will, capable under other circumstances of strenuous and
sustained exertion, there is no occasion to anticipate a failure
here. Even in cases of impaired health, and with a diminished capacity
for resolute endeavor, success is, I believe, attainable, provided
sufficient time be taken for the trial.

A further condition lies in the attempt being made under the most
favorable circumstances in respect to absolute leisure from business
of every kind. That nothing can be accomplished by persons whose time
is not at their own command, by a graduated effort protracted through
many months, I do not say, for I do not believe it; but any speedy
relinquishment of opium--that is, within a month or two--seems to me
to be wholly impossible, except to those who are so situated that they
can give up their whole time and attention to the effort.

This effort should be made with the advice and under the eye of an
intelligent physician. So far as I have had opportunity to know, the
profession generally is not well informed on the subject. In my own
case I certainly found no one who seemed familiar with the phenomena
pertaining to the relinquishment of opium, or whose suggestions
indicated even in cases where the physician has had no experience
whatever in this class of disorders, he can, if a well-educated man,
bring his medical knowledge and medical reasoning to bear upon the
various states, both of body and mind, which the varying sufferings of
the patient may make known to him. Were there, indeed, no professional
helps to be secured by such consultation, it is still of infinite
service to the patient to know some one to whom he can frequently
impart the history of his struggle and the progress he is making. Such
confidence may do much to encourage the patient, and no one is so
proper a person in whom to repose this confidence as an intelligent
physician.

The amount of time which should be devoted to the experiment must
depend very greatly upon these considerations--the constitution of
the patient, the length of time which has elapsed since the habit was
formed, and the quantity habitually taken. When the habit is of recent
date, and the daily dose has not been large--say not more than ten or
twelve grains--if the patient has average health, his emancipation
from the evil may be attained in a comparatively short period, though
not without many sharp pangs and many wakeful nights which will call
for the exercise of all his resolution.

The question will naturally suggest itself to others, as it has often
done to myself, whether a less sudden relinquishment of opium would
not be preferable as being attended with less present and less
subsequent suffering. Numerous cases have come under my notice where a
very gradual reduction was attempted, but which resulted in
failure. Only two exceptions are known to me: in one of these the
patient, himself a physician, effected his release by a graduated
reduction extending through five months. The other is the case of
Dr. S., a physician of eminence in Connecticut many years ago. This
gentleman had made so free use of opium to counteract a tendency to
consumption that the habit became established. After several years,
and at the suggestion of his wife, he made a resolution to abandon it,
engaging to take no opium except as it passed through her hands, but
with the understanding that the process of relinquishment was to be
slow and gradual. His allowance at this time was understood to be from
twenty to thirty grains of crude opium daily. At the end of two years
the habit was abandoned, with no very serious suffering during the
time, and so far as his daughter was informed, with no subsequent
inconvenience to himself. He lived many years after his disuse of
opium, in the active discharge of the duties of his profession, and
died at last in the ninetieth year of his age.  The hazard of this
course, however, consists in the possibility, not to say with some
temperaments the probability, that somewhere in the course of so very
gradual a descent the same influences which led originally to the use
of opium may recur, with no counteracting influence derived from the
excitement of the mind produced by the earnestness of the
struggle. With some constitutions I have no doubt that a process even
so slow as that of Dr. S.'s might be successful, but I suspect, with
most men, that some mood of excited feeling, and some conscious sense
of conflict, will be found necessary, in order to bring them up
resolutely to the work of self-emancipation. On the other hand, I am
satisfied that my own descent was too rapid. Had the experiment of
between five and six weeks been protracted to twice that time, much of
the immediate suffering, and probably more of that which soon
followed, might have been prevented. As in the constitution of every
person there is a limit beyond which further indulgence in any
pernicious habit results in chronic derangement, so also there seems
to be a limit in the discontinuance of accustomed indulgence, going
beyond which is sure to result in some increased physical disorder. In
the cure of _delirium tremens_, the first step of the physician
is to stimulate. With more moderate drinkers abrupt cessation from the
use of stimulants is the only sure remedy. In the first instance the
nervous system is too violently agitated to dispense entirely with the
accustomed habit; in the second, the nerves are presumed to be able to
bear the temporary strain imposed upon them by the condition of the
stomach and other organs. But with opium the case is otherwise.
Insanity, I think, would be the general result of an attempt
immediately to relinquish the habit by those who have long indulged
it. The most the opium-eater can do is to diminish his allowance as
rapidly as is safe. For the same reason that no sensible physician
would direct the confinement of a patient and the absolute disuse of
opium with the certainty that mania would result, so it would be
equally ill advised to recommend a diminution so rapid as necessarily
to call out the most serious disorder and derangement of all the
bodily functions, especially if these could be made more endurable by
being spread over a longer period. In one respect the opium-eater has
greatly the advantage over those addicted to other bad habits. 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. As De Quincey justly represents
it, the feeling is more that of a person under actual torture, aching
for relief, though with no care from what source that relief comes. So
far from there being any particular desire for opium, there ensues
very speedily, I suspect, after the attempt to abandon it is begun,
and long before the necessity for its use has ceased, and even while
the suffering from its partial disuse is most unendurable, a feeling
in reference to the drug itself not far removed from disgust. The only
occasion that I have had of late years to make use of opium or any of
its preparations, was within a twelvemonth after it had been laid
aside. A morbid feeling had long troubled me with the suggestion that
should a necessity ever arise for the medical use of opium, I might be
precipitated back into the habit. I was not sorry, therefore, when the
necessity for its use occurred, that I might test the correctness of
my apprehension. To my surprise, not only was no desire for a second
trial of its virtues awakened, but the very effort to swallow the pill
was accompanied with a feeling akin to loathing.

The final decision of the question, How long a time should be allowed
for the final relinquishment of the drug? must, I imagine, be left to
a wider experience than has yet been recorded. The general strength of
the constitution, the force of the will, the degree of nervous
sensibility, together with the external circumstances of one's life,
have all much to do with its proper explication.

The general directions I should be disposed to suggest for the
observance of the confirmed opium-eater would be something as follows:

1. To diminish the daily allowance as rapidly as possible to
one-half. A fortnight's time should effect this without serious
suffering, or any thing more than the slight irritation and some other
inconveniences that will be found quite endurable to one who is in
earnest in his purpose.

2. For the first week, if the previous habit has been to take the
daily dose in a single portion, or even in two portions, morning and
night, it will be found advisable to divide the diminished quantity
into four parts. Thus, if eighty grains has been the customary
quantity taken, four pills of fifteen grains each, taken at regular
intervals, say one at eight and one at twelve o'clock in the morning,
and one at four and one at eight in the evening, will be found nearly
equal in their effect to the eighty grains taken at once in the
morning.  A further diminution of two grains a day, or of half a grain
in each of these four daily portions, will within the week reduce the
quantity taken to fifty grains, and this without much difficulty, and
with positive gain in respect to elasticity of spirits, arising, in
part, from the newly-awakened hope of ultimate success. A second week
should suffice for a reduction to forty grains. It will probably be
better to divide the slightly diminished daily allowance into five
portions, to be taken at intervals of two hours from rising in the
morning till the daily quantity is consumed. With such a graduated
scale of descent, it will be found at the end of two weeks that
one-half of the original quantity of opium has been abandoned, and
that, with so little pain of body, and so much gain to the general
health and spirits, that the completion of the task will seem to the
patient ridiculously easy.  He will soon learn, however, that he has
not found out all the truth.

In the third week a further gain of ten grains can the more easily be
made by still further dividing the daily portion into an increased
number of parts, say ten. The feeling of restlessness and irritability
by this time will have become somewhat annoying, and the actual
struggle will be seen to have commenced. It will doubtless require at
this point some persistence of character to bear up against the
increased impatience, both of body and spirit, which marks this stage
of the descent. The feelings will endeavor to palm off upon the
judgment a variety of reasons why, for a time, a larger quantity
should be taken; but this is merely the effect of the diminished
amount of the stimulant. Sleep will probably be found to be of short
continuance as well as a good deal broken. Reading has ceased to
interest, and a fidgety, fault-finding temper not unlikely has begun
to exhibit itself.  At this point, I am satisfied, most opium-eaters
who have endeavored in vain to renounce the habit, have broken down.
Their resolution has failed them not because they were unable to stand
much greater punishment than had yet been inflicted, but because they
yielded to the impression that some other time would prove more
opportune for the final experiment. Under this delusion they have
foolishly thrown away the benefit of their past self-control, with the
certainty that should the trial be again made, they would once more be
assailed by a similar temptation. But if this stage of the process has
been safely passed, the next--that of reducing the daily quantity from
thirty grains to twenty-five, still dividing the day's allowance into
ten portions--would probably have added little aggravation to the
uncomfortable feeling which already existed, but not without some
conscious addition, on the other hand, to their enjoyment from the
partially successful result of the experiment. Thus in four weeks a
very substantial gain, by the reduction of the needed quantity from
eighty grains to twenty-five, would have been attained.

If the patient should find it necessary to stop at this point for a
week, a fortnight, or even longer, no great harm would necessarily
result; it would only postpone by so much his ultimate triumph. He
should never forget, however, that the one indispensable condition of
success is this: _Never under any circumstances to give up what has
been once gained_.  If in any manner the patient has been able to
get through the day with the use of only twenty-five grains, it is
certain that he can get through the next, and the next, and the
subsequent day with the same amount, with the further certainty that
the habit of being content with this minimum quantity will soon begin
to be established, and that speedily a further advance may be made in
the direction of an entire disuse. Whenever the patient finds his
condition to be somewhat more endurable, whether the time be longer or
shorter, he should make a still further reduction, say to one-quarter
of his original dose. If this abatement of quantity be spread over the
entire week the aggravation of his discomfort will not be great, while
the elation of his spirits over what he has already accomplished will
go far in enabling him to bear the degree of pain which necessarily
pertains to the stage of the experiment which he has now reached. The
caution, however, must be borne continually in mind that under no
circumstances and on no pretext must the patient entertain the idea
that any part of that which he has gained can he surrendered.  Better
for him to be years in the accomplishment of his deliverance than to
recede a step from any advantage he may have secured. If he persists,
he will in a few days, or at the longest in a few weeks, find his
condition as to bodily pain endurable if nothing more. There may not,
probably will not be any very appreciable gain from day to day. The
excited sufferer, judging from his feelings alone, may think that he
has made no progress whatever; but if after the lapse of a week he
will contrast his command of temper, or his ability to fix his
attention upon a subject, as evinced at the beginning and end of this
period, he can hardly fail to see that there has been a real if not a
very marked advance in his status. Such a person has no right to
expect, after years of uninterrupted indulgence, that the most
obstinate of all habits can be relinquished with ease, or that he can
escape the penalty which is wisely and kindly attached to all
departures from the natural or supernatural laws which govern the
world. It should be enough for him to know that there is no habit of
mind or of body which may not be overcome, and that the process of
overcoming, in its infinite variety of forms, is that out of which
almost all that is good in character or conduct grows, and that the
amount of this good is usually measured by the struggle which has been
found necessary to ensure success.

Considerations of this nature, however, are of too general a character
to be of much service to one enduring the misery of the reforming
opium-eater. He has now arrived at a point where he is obliged to ask
himself when and how the contest is to end. He has succeeded in
abandoning three-quarters of the opium to which he has so long been
accustomed.  A few weeks have enabled him to accomplish this much.  He
endures, indeed, great discomfort by day and by night; but hope has
been re-awakened; his mind has recovered greater activity than it has
known for years; and, on the whole, he feels that he has been greatly
the gainer from the contest.

Let me repeat, that the main thing for the patient at this point of
his trial is not to forego the advantage he has already attained--"not
to go back." If he can only hold his own he has so far triumphed, and
it is only a question of time when the triumph shall be made
complete. _When_ this shall be effected _he_ must decide.
The rapidity of his further progress must be determined by what
he himself is conscious he has the strength, physical and moral,
to endure. With some natures any very sudden descent is impossible;
with others, whatever is done must be done continuously and rapidly or
is not done at all. The one temperament can not stand up against the
assaults of a fierce attack, the other loses courage except when the
fight is at the hottest. For the former ample time must be given or he
surrenders; the latter will succumb if any interval is allowed for
repose. It is, therefore, difficult to suggest from this point
downward any rule which shall apply equally to temperaments
essentially unlike. I think, however, that the suggestion to divide
the daily allowance, whether the descent be a slow or a rapid one,
into numerous small parts to be taken at equal intervals of time, will
be found to facilitate the success of the attempt in the case of
both. The chief value of such subdivision probably consists in its
throwing the aggregate influence of the day's opium nearer the hour of
bed-time, when it is most needed, than to an earlier hour, when its
soporific power is less felt. In addition to this, the importance to
the excited and irritated patient of being able to look forward during
the long-protracted hours to frequent, even if slight, alleviations of
his pain, should not be left out of the account. In general it may be
said that whenever the patient feels that he can safely, that is,
without danger of failing in his resolution, adventure upon a further
diminution of the quantity, an additional amount, smaller or greater
according to circumstances, should be deducted till the point is
reached where the suffering becomes unendurable; then after a delay of
few or many days, as may be needed to make him somewhat habituated to
the diminished allowance, a still further reduction should be made,
and so on for such time as the peculiarities of different
constitutions and circumstances may make necessary, till the quantity
daily required has become so small, say a grain or two, that by still
more minute subdivisions, and by dropping one of them daily, the final
victory is achieved.

I have not ventured to say in how short a time confirmed habits of
opium-eating may be abandoned. In my own case it was thirty-nine days,
but with my present experience I should greatly prefer to extend the
time to at least sixty days; and this chiefly with reference to the
violent effects upon the constitution produced by the suddenness of
the change of habit. Some constitutions may possibly require less time
and some probably, more. While I regard the abandonment of the first
three-quarters of the accustomed allowance as being a much easier task
than the last quarter, and one which can be accomplished with
comparative impunity in a brief period, I would allow at least twice
the time for the experiment of dispensing with the last quarter;
unless, indeed, I should be apprehensive that my resolution might
break down through the absence of the excitement which is
unquestionably afforded by the feeling that you are engaged in a
deadly but doubtful conflict. So far, also, as can be inferred from
cases subsequently narrated in this volume, the probability of success
would seem to be enhanced by devoting a longer time to the trial. It
can not, however, be too often repeated, that however slow or however
rapid the pace may be, the rule to be rigidly observed is this: Never
to increase the minimum dose that has once been attained.  This is the
only rule of safety, and by adhering to it, persons in infirm health,
or with weakened powers of resolution, will ultimately succeed in
their efforts.

I subjoin my own record of the quantity of opium daily consumed, for
the possible encouragement of such opium-eaters as may be disposed to
make trial of their own resources in the endurance of bodily and
mental distress.

Saturday,   Nov. 25....80 grains, = 2000 drops of laudanum.
Sunday,      "   26....60   "       1500   "         "
Monday,      "   27....50   "       1250   "         "
Tuesday,     "   28....40   "       1000   "         "
Wednesday,   "   29....30   "        750   "         "
Thursday,    "   30....25   "        625   "         "
Friday,     Dec.  1....20   "        500   "         "
                       ---         -----
Average of 1st week....44   "       1089   "         "

Saturday,   Dec. 2.....19 grains, = 475 drops of laudanum.
Sunday,      "   3.....18   "       450   "         "
Monday,      "   4.....17   "       425   "         "
Tuesday,     "   5.....16   "       400   "         "
Wednesday,   "   6.....15   "       375   "         "
Thursday,    "   7.....15   "       375   "         "
Friday,      "   8.....15   "       375   "         "
                  ----        ----
Average of 2d week.....16.43"       411   "         "

Saturday,   Dec. 9.....14 grains, = 350 drops of laudanum.
Sunday,      "  10.....13   "       325   "         "
Monday,      "  11.....13   "       325   "         "
Tuesday,     "  12.....12   "       300   "         "
Wednesday,   "  13.....12   "       300   "         "
Thursday,    "  14.....11   "       275   "         "
Friday,      "  15.....10   "       250   "         "
                  ----        ----
Average of 3d week.....12.14"       304   "         "

Saturday,   Dec.16..... 9 grains, = 225 drops of laudanum.
Sunday,      "  17..... 8   "       200   "         "
Monday,      "  18..... 8   "       200   "         "
Tuesday,     "  19..... 7   "       175   "         "
Wednesday,   "  20..... 6   "       150   "         "
Thursday,    "  21..... 5   "       125   "         "
Friday,      "  22..... 4   "       100   "         "
                  ----        ----
Average of 4th week.....6.71"       168   "         "

Saturday,   Dec.23..... 3 grains, =  75 drops of laudanum.
Sunday,      "  24..... 3   "        75   "         "
Monday,      "  25..... 2   "        50   "         "
Tuesday,     "  26..... 2   "        50   "         "
Wednesday,   "  27..... 2   "        50   "         "
Thursday,    "  28..... 2   "        50   "         "
Friday,      "  29..... 1   "        25   "         "
                  ----        ----
Average of 5th week.....2.14"        54   "         "

Saturday,   Dec.30..... 1 grain,  =  25 drops of laudanum.
Sunday,      "  31..... 1   "        25   "         "
Monday,     Jan. 1..... 1   "        25   "         "
Tuesday,     "   2.....1/2  "        12   "         "
Wednesday,   "   3.....1/4  "         6   "         "
                  ----        ----
Average of 6th week....0.75 "        18   "         "

The fourth and fifth weeks I found to be immeasurably the most
difficult to manage. By the sixth week the system had become somewhat
accustomed to the denial of the long-used stimulant. At any rate,
though no abatement of the previous wretchedness was apparent, it
certainly seemed less difficult to endure it. It is at this stage of
the process that I regard the advice and encouragement of a physician
as most important. He may not indeed be able to do much in direct
alleviation of the pain incident to the abandonment of opium, for I
suspect that little reliance can be placed upon the medicines
ordinarily recommended. The system has become accustomed to the
stimulant to an exorbitant degree; the suffering is consequent upon
the effort to accustom the system to get on without it. Other kinds of
stimulants, like spirits or wine, will afford a slight relief for a
few days, especially if taken in sufficiently large quantities to
induce sleep. It is the sedative qualities of the opium that are
chiefly missed, for as to excitement the patient has quite as much of
it as he can bear. For this reason malt liquors are preferable to
distilled spirits--they stupefy more than they excite. But to malt
liquors this serious objection exists, they tend powerfully to
aggravate all disorders of the liver.  This tendency the reforming
opium-eater can not afford to overlook, for no one effect of the
experiment is more distressing than the marvellous and unhealthy
activity given to this organ by the process through which he is
passing. The testimony of all opium-eaters on this point is
uniform. For months and even years this organ in those who have
relinquished the drug remains disordered. When in its worst state, the
use of something bitter, the more bitter the better, is exceedingly
grateful. The difficulty lies in finding any thing that has a properly
bitter taste. Aloes, nux vomica, colocynth, quassia, have a flavor
that is much more sweet than bitter. These serious annoyances from the
condition of the liver, as well as those arising from the state of the
stomach and some of the other organs, may be somewhat mitigated by the
skill of an intelligent medical man, who, even if he happens to know
little about the habit of opium-eating, should know much as to the
proper regimen to be observed in cases where these organs are
disordered.

In respect to food it seems impossible to lay down any general
rule. De Quincey advises beefsteak, not too much cooked, and stale
bread as the chief diet, and doubtless this was the best diet for
him. Yet it is not the less true that "what is one man's meat is
another man's poison," and food that is absolutely harmless to one may
disorder the entire digestion of another. Roast pork, mince pies, and
cheese do not, I believe, rank high with the Faculty for ease of
digestion, yet I have found them comparatively innoxious, while
poultry, milk, oysters, fish, some kinds of vegetables, and even dry
toast have caused me serious inconvenience.  The appetite of the
recovering opium-eater will probably be voracious and not at all
discriminating during the earlier stages of his experiment, and will
continue unimpaired even when the stomach begins to be fastidious as
to what it will receive. Probably no safer rule can be given than to
limit the quantity eaten as far as practicable, and to use only such
food as in each particular case is found to be most easy of digestion.

Too much prominence can not be given to bodily exercise as intimately
connected with the recovery of the patient.  Without this it seems to
me doubtful whether a person could withstand the extreme irritation of
his nervous system. In his worst state he can not sit still; he must
be moving.  The complication of springs in the famous Kilmansegge leg,
is nothing compared with the necesity for motion which is developed in
the limbs of the recovering opium-eater.  Whatever his health,
whatever his spirits, whatever the weather, walk he must. Ten miles
before breakfast will be found a moderate allowance for many months
after the habit has been subdued. A patient who could afford to give
up three months of his time after the opium had been entirely
discarded, to the perfect recovery of his health, could probably turn
it to no better account than by stretching out on a pedestrian
excursion of a thousand miles and back.  This would be at the rate of
nearly twenty-six miles a day, allowing Sunday as a day of rest. This
advice is seriously given for the consideration of those who can
command the time for such a thorough process of restoration. Nor
should any weight be given to the objection that the body is in too
enfeebled a state to make it safe to venture upon such an
experiment. Account for it as physiologists may, it is certain that
the debilitating effects of leaving off opium much more rapidly pass
away from the lower extremities than from the rest of the body. At no
time subsequent to my mastery of opium have I found any difficulty in
accomplishing the longest walks; on the contrary they have been taken
with entire ease and pleasure. Yet to this day, any considerable
exercise of the other muscles is attended with extreme debility. In
the absence of facilities for walking, gymnastic exercise is not
wholly without benefit, and if this exercise is followed by a cold
bath, some portion of the insupportable languor will be
removed. Walking, however, is the great panacea, nor can it well be
taken in excess. So important is this element in the restorative
process that it may well be doubted whether without its aid a
confirmed opium-eater could be restored to health.

It is useless for any person to think that he can break off even the
least inveterate of his habits without effort, or the more obstinate
ones without a struggle. Wine, spirits, tobacco, after years of
habitual use, require a degree of resolution which is sometimes found
to be beyond the resources of the will. Much more does opium, whose
hold upon the system is vastly more tenacious than all these combined,
call for a resolute determination prepared to meet all the possible
consequences that pertain to a complete and perfect mastery of the
habit. It should be remembered, however, that the experience here
recorded is that resulting from years of large and uninterrupted use
of opium. The entire system had necessarily conformed itself to the
artificial habit. For years the proper action of the nervous,
muscular, digestive, and secretory system had been impeded and forced
in an unnatural direction. In time all the vital functions had
conformed as far as possible to the necessity imposed upon
them. Scarce a function of the body that had not been daily drilled
into a highly artificial adaptation to the conditions imposed upon the
system by the use of opium. Nature, indeed, for a time rebels and
resists the attempt to impose unnatural habitudes upon her action; but
there is a limit to her resistance, and she is then found to possess a
marvellous power of reconciling the processes of life with the
disturbance and disorder of almost the entire human organization.
This power of adaptation, while it unquestionably lures on to the
continued indulgence of all kinds of bad habits, is, on the other
hand, the only hope and assurance the sufferer from such causes can
have of ultimate recovery from his danger. If it requires years to
establish bad habits in the animal economy, why should we expect that
they can be wholly eradicated except by a reversal, in these respects,
of the entire current of the life, or without allowing a commensurate
time for that perfect restoration of the disordered functions which is
expected?

If this view of the case is not encouraging to the veteran consumer of
opium, it certainly is not without its suggestive utility to that
larger class whose use of opium has been comparatively limited both in
time and quantity. Fortunately, much the greater number of
opium-eaters take the drug in small quantities or have made use of it
for only a limited period. In their case the process of recovery is
relatively easy; the functions of their physical organization still
act for the most part in a normal way; they have to retrace
comparatively few steps and for comparatively a short time.  Even to
the inveterate consumer of the drug it has been made manifest that he
may emancipate himself from his bondage if he will manfully accept the
conditions upon which alone he can accomplish it. In the worst
conceivable cases it is at least a choice between evils; if he
abandons opium, he may count upon much suffering of body, many
sleepless nights, a disordered nervous system, and at times great
prostration of strength. If he continues the habit, there remains, as
long as life lasts, the irresolute will, the bodily languor, the
ever-present sense of hopeless, helpless ruin. The opium-eater must
take his choice between the two. On the one hand is hope, continually
brightening in the future--on the other is the inconceivable
wretchedness of one from whom hope has forever fled.



DE QUINCEY'S "CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER."


Under this title an article appeared in the "London Magazine" for
December, 1821, which attracted very general attention from its
literary merit and the novelty of its revelations.  So considerable
was the interest excited in these "Confessions" that the article was
speedily republished in book form both in London and this country. The
reading public outside of the medical profession were thus for the
first time made generally acquainted with the tremendous potency of a
drug whose fascinations have since become almost as well known to the
inhabitants of England and America as to the people of India or
China. The general properties of the drug had of course been familiar
to intelligent men from the days of Vasco de Gama, but how easily the
habit of using it could be acquired, and with what difficulty when
acquired it could be left off, were subjects respecting which great
obscurity rested on the minds even of medical men. Such parts only of
these "Confessions" as have relation to De Quincey's habits as an
opium-eater, have been selected for republication; such extracts from
his other writings are added as embody his entire experience of opium
so far as he has given it to the world.

       *       *       *       *       *

I here present you, courteous reader, with the record of a remarkable
period of my life. According to my application of it, I trust that it
will prove not merely an interesting record, but in a considerable
degree useful and instructive. In _that_ hope it is that I have
drawn it up, and _that_ must be my apology for breaking through
that delicate and honorable reserve which for the most part restrains
us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities.

Guilt and misery shrink by a natural instinct from public notice: they
court privacy and solitude; and, even in the choice of a grave, will
sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the
church-yard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family
of man, and wishing--in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth--

  'Humbly to express
  A penitential loneliness.'

It is well, upon the whole, and for the interest of us all that it
should be so; nor would I willingly, in my own person, manifest a
disregard of such salutary feelings, nor in act or word do any thing
to weaken them. But on the one hand, as my self-accusation does not
amount to a confession of guilt, so on the other, it is possible that,
if it did, the benefit resulting to others from the record of an
experience purchased at so heavy a price might compensate, by a vast
over-balance, for any violence done to the feelings I have noticed,
and justify a breach of the general rule. Infirmity and misery do not,
of necessity, imply guilt. They approach or recede from the shades of
that dark alliance in proportion to the probable motives and prospects
of the offender, and the palliations, known or secret, of the offense;
in proportion as the temptations to it were potent from the first, and
the resistance to it, in act or in effort, was earnest to the
last. For my own part, without breach of truth or modesty, I may
affirm that my life has been on the whole the life of a philosopher;
from my birth I was made an intellectual creature; and intellectual in
the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my
school-boy days. If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am
bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess not yet
_recorded_ [Footnote: "Not yet _recorded_," I say; for there
is one celebrated man of the present day [Coleridge] who, if all be
true which is reported of him, has greatly exceeded me in quantity.]
of any other man, it is no less true that I have struggled against
this fascinating enthrallment with a religious zeal, and have at
length accomplished what I never yet heard attributed to any other
man--have untwisted, almost to its final links, the accursed chain
which fettered me. Such a self-conquest may reasonably be set off in
counterbalance to any kind or degree of self-indulgence. Not to insist
that, in my case, the self-conquest was unquestionable, the
self-indulgence open to doubts of casuistry, according as that name
shall be extended to acts aiming at the bare relief of pain, or shall
be restricted to such as aim at the excitement of positive pleasure.

Guilt, therefore, I do not acknowledge; and, if I did, it is possible
that I might still resolve on the present act of confession, in
consideration of the service which I may thereby render to the whole
class of opium-eaters. But who are they? Reader, I am sorry to say, a
very numerous class indeed. Of this I became convinced some years ago,
by computing at that time the number of those in one small class of
English society (the class of men distinguished for talent, or of
eminent station) who were known to me, directly or indirectly, as
opium-eaters; such, for instance, as the eloquent and benevolent
-----, the late Dean of -----; Lord -----; Mr. -----, the philosopher;
a late under-secretary of state (who described to me the sensation
which first drove him to the use of opium in the very same words of
the Dean of -----, viz., "that he felt as though rats were gnawing and
abrading the coats of his stomach"); Mr. -----; and many others,
hardly less known, whom it would be tedious to mention. Now if one
class, comparatively so limited, could furnish so many scores of cases
(and that within the knowledge of one single inquirer), it was a
natural inference that the entire population of England would furnish
a proportionable number.  The soundness of this inference, however, I
doubted, until some facts became known to me which satisfied me that
it was not incorrect. I will mention two: 1. Three respectable London
druggists, in widely remote quarters of London, from whom I happened
lately to be purchasing small quantities of opium, assured me that the
number of _amateur_ opium-eaters (as I may term them) was at
this time immense; and that the difficulty of distinguishing these
persons, to whom habit had rendered opium necessary, from such as were
purchasing it with a view to suicide, occasioned them daily trouble
and disputes. This evidence respected London only.  But, 2, (which
will possibly surprise the reader more,) some years ago, on passing
through Manchester, I was informed by several cotton manufacturers
that their work-people were rapidly getting into the practice of
opium-eating; so much so that on a Saturday afternoon the counters of
the druggists were strewed with pills of one, two, or three grains, in
preparation for the known demand of the evening. The immediate
occasion of this practice was the lowness of wages, which at that time
would not allow them to indulge in ale or spirits, and wages rising,
it may be thought that this practice would cease; but as I do not
readily believe that any man, having once tasted the divine luxuries
of opium, will afterward descend to the gross and mortal enjoyments of
alcohol, I take it for granted

    "That those eat now who never ate before;
    And those who always ate, now eat the more."

I have often been asked how I first came to be a regular opium-eater,
and have suffered very unjustly in the opinion of my acquaintance,
from being reputed to have brought upon myself all the sufferings
which I shall have to record, by a long course of indulgence in this
practice purely for the sake of creating an artificial state of
pleasurable excitement.  This, however, is a misrepresentation of my
case. True it is that for nearly ten years I did occasionally take
opium for the sake of the exquisite pleasure it gave me; but, so long
as I took it with this view, I was effectually protected from all
material bad consequences by the necessity of interposing long
intervals between the several acts of indulgence, in order to renew
the pleasurable sensations. It was not for the purpose of creating
pleasure, but of mitigating pain in the severest degree, that I first
began to use opium as an article of daily diet. In the twenty-eighth
year of my age a most painful affection of the stomach, which I had
first experienced about ten years before, attacked me in great
strength.  This affection had originally been caused by the
extremities of hunger suffered in my boyish days. During the season of
hope and redundant happiness which succeeded (that is, from eighteen
to twenty-four) it had slumbered; for the three following years it had
revived at intervals; and now, under unfavorable circumstances, from
depression of spirits, it attacked me with a violence that yielded to
no remedies but opium.

It is so long since I first took opium, that if it had been a trifling
incident in my life I might have forgotten its date; but cardinal
events are not to be forgotten; and, from circumstances connected with
it, I remember that it must be referred to the autumn of 1804. During
that season I was in London, having come thither for the first time
since my entrance at college. And my introduction to opium arose in
the following way: From an early age I had been accustomed to wash my
head in cold water at least once a day.  Being suddenly seized with
toothache, I attributed it to some relaxation caused by an accidental
intermission of that practice; jumped out of bed, plunged my head into
a basin of cold water, and with hair thus wetted went to sleep. The
next morning, as I need hardly say, I awoke with excruciating
rheumatic pains of the head and face, from which I had hardly any
respite for about twenty days. On the twenty-first day I think it
was, and on a Sunday, that I went out into the streets; rather to run
away, if possible, from my torments than with any distinct purpose. By
accident I met a college acquaintance, who recommended opium. Opium!
dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and pain! I had heard of it as I
had heard of manna or of ambrosia, but no further. How unmeaning a
sound it was at that time! what solemn chords does it now strike upon
my heart! what heart-quaking vibrations of sad and happy
remembrances! It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless; and a
duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy
Sunday in London. My road homeward lay through Oxford Street, and near
the "Pantheon" I saw a druggist's shop.  The druggist (unconscious
minister of celestial pleasures!), as if in sympathy with the rainy
Sunday, looked dull and stupid, just as any mortal druggist might be
expected to look on a Sunday, and when I asked for the tincture of
opium he gave it to me as any other man might do; and furthermore, out
of my shilling returned to me what seemed to be a real copper
half-penny, taken out of a real wooden drawer.  Nevertheless, in spite
of such indications of humanity, he has ever since existed in my mind
as a beatific vision of an immortal druggist sent down to earth on a
special mission to myself.

Arrived at my lodgings, it may be supposed that I lost not a moment in
taking the quantity prescribed. I was necessarily ignorant of the
whole art and mystery of opium-taking, and what I took, I took under
every disadvantage.  But I took it; and in an hour--O heavens! what a
revulsion!  what an upheaving from its lowest depths of the inner
spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had
vanished was now a trifle in my eyes--this negative effect was
swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had
opened before me in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly
revealed. Here was a panacea, a _phaomakon nepenfes_, for all
human woes; here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers
had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered. Happiness might now
be bought for a penny and carried in the waistcoat pocket; portable
ecstacies might be had corked up in a pint-bottle; and peace of mind
could be sent down in gallons by the mail-coach. But if I talk in this
way the reader will think I am laughing, and I can assure him that
nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium. Its pleasures even
are of a grave and solemn complexion, and in his happiest state the
opium-eater can not present himself in the character of
_L'Allegro_; even then he speaks and thinks as becomes _Il
Penseroso_.

And first one word with respect to its bodily effects; for upon all
that has been hitherto written on the subject of opium, whether by
travellers in Turkey (who may plead their privilege of lying as an old
immemorial right) or by professors of medicine, writing _ex
cathedra_, I have but one emphatic criticism to pronounce--Lies!
lies! lies! I do by no means deny that some truths have been delivered
to the world in regard to opium: thus it has been repeatedly affirmed
by the learned that opium is a dusky brown in color, and this, take
notice, I grant; secondly, that it is rather dear, which also I
grant--for in my time East India opium has been three guineas a pound,
and Turkey eight; and thirdly, that if you eat a good deal of it, most
probably you must do what is particularly disagreeable to any man of
regular habits, viz., die. These weighty propositions are, all and
singular, true; I can not gainsay them; and truth ever was and will be
commendable. But in these three theorems I believe we have exhausted
the stock of knowledge as yet accumulated by man on the subject of
opium. And therefore, worthy doctors, as there seems to be room for
further discoveries, stand aside and allow me to come forward and
lecture on this matter.

First, then, it is not so much affirmed as taken for granted by all
who ever mention opium, formally or incidentally, that it does or can
produce intoxication. Now, reader, assure yourself, _meo periculo_,
that no quantity of opium ever did or could intoxicate. As to the
tincture of opium, commonly called laudanum, _that_ might certainly
intoxicate if a man could bear to take enough of it; but why? because
it contains so much proof spirit, and not because it contains so much
opium. But crude opium, I affirm peremptorily, is incapable of
producing any state of body at all resembling that which is produced
by alcohol; and not in _degree_ only incapable, but even in _kind_; it
is not in the quantity of its effects merely, but in the quality, that
it differs altogether.  The pleasure given by wine is always mounting
and tending to a crisis, after which it declines; that from opium,
when once generated, is stationary for eight or ten hours; the first,
to borrow a technical distinction from medicine, is a case of acute,
the second of chronic, pleasure; the one is a flame, the other a
steady and equable glow. But the main distinction lies in this, that
whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium, on the contrary
(if taken in a proper manner), introduces among them the most
exquisite order, legislation, and harmony.  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. Thus, for instance, opium, like wine, gives an
expansion to the heart and the benevolent affections; but then with
this remarkable difference, that in the sudden development of
kind-heartedness which accompanies inebriation there is always more or
less of a maudlin character which exposes it to the contempt of the
by-stander.  Men shake hands, swear eternal friendship, and shed
tears--no mortal knows why--and the sensual creature is clearly
uppermost. But the expansion of the benigner feelings, incident to
opium, is no febrile access, but a healthy restoration to that state
which the mind would naturally recover upon the removal of any
deep-seated irritation of pain that had disturbed and quarrelled with
the impulse of a heart originally just and good. Wine constantly leads
a man to the brink of absurdity and extravagance, and beyond a certain
point it is sure to volatilize and to dispence the intellectual
energies; whereas opium always seens to compose what had been
agitated, and to concentrate what had been distracted.  In short, to
sum up all in one word, a man who is, inebriated, or tending to
inebriation, is, and feels that he is in a condition which calls up
into supremacy the merely human, too often the brutal, part of his
nature; but the opium-eater (I speak of him who is not suffering from
any disease, or other remote effects of opium) feels that the diviner
part of his nature is paramount; that is, the moral affections are in
a state of cloudless serenity; and over all is the great light of the
majestic intellect.

This is the doctrine of the true Church on the subject of opium: of
which Church I acknowledge myself to be the only member--the alpha and
omega; but then it is to be recollected that I speak from the ground
of a large and profound personal experience, whereas most of the
unscientific authors who have at all treated of opium, and even of
those who have written expressly on the _materia medica_, make it
evident from the horror they express of it that their experimental
knowledge of its action is none at all. I will, however, candidly
acknowledge that I have met with one person who bore evidence to its
intoxicating power such as staggered my own incredulity; for he was a
surgeon, and had himself taken opium largely. I happened to say to
him, that his enemies (as I had heard) charged him with talking
nonsense on politics, and that his friends apologized for him by
suggesting that he was constantly in a state of intoxication from
opium. Now the accusation, said I, is not _prima facie_, and of
necessity an absurd one; but the defense _is_. To my surprise,
however, he insisted that both his enemies and his friends were in the
right. "I will maintain," said he, "that I _do_ talk nonsense;
and secondly, I will maintain that I do not talk nonsense upon
principle, or with any view to profit, but solely and simply," said
he, "solely and simply--solely and simply," repeating it three times
over, "because I am drunk with opium; and that daily." I confess, that
the authority of a surgeon, and one who was reputed a good one, may
seem a weighty one to my prejudice; but still I must plead my
experience, which was greater than his greatest by seven thousand
drops a day; and though it was not possible to suppose a medical man
unacquainted with the characteristic symptoms of vinous intoxication,
yet it struck me that he might proceed on a logical error of using the
word intoxication with too great latitude, and extending it
generically to all modes of nervous excitement, instead of restricting
it as the expression for a specific sort of excitement connected with
certain diagnostics. Some people have maintained, in my hearing, that
they had been drunk upon green tea; and a medical student in London,
for whose knowledge in his profession I have reason to feel great
respect, assured me the other day that a patient in recovering from an
illness had got drunk on a beefsteak.

Having dwelt so much on this first and leading error in respect to
opium, I shall notice very briefly a second and a third; which are,
that the elevation of spirits produced by opium is necessarily
followed by a proportionate depression, and that the natural and even
immediate consequence of opium is torpor and stagnation, animal and
mental. The first of these errors I shall content myself with simply
denying; assuring my reader that for ten years, during which I took
opium at intervals, the day succeeding to that on which I allowed
myself this luxury was always a day of unusually good spirits.

With respect to the torpor supposed to follow, or rather (if we were
to credit the numerous pictures of Turkish opium-eaters) to accompany
the practice of opium-eating, I deny that also. Certainly, opium is
classed under the head of narcotics, and some such effect it may
produce in the end, but the primary effects of opium are always, and
in the highest degree, to excite and stimulate the system. This first
stage of its action always lasted with me, during my novitiate, for
upward of eight hours, so that it must be the fault of the opium-eater
himself if he does not so time his exhibition of the dose (to speak
medically) as that the whole weight of its narcotic influence may
descend upon his sleep.

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.

Courteous, and I hope indulgent reader, having accompanied me thus
far, now let me request you to move onward for about eight years; that
is to say, from 1804 (when I said that my acquaintance with opium
first began) to 1812.  And what am I doing? Taking opium. Yes, but
what else?  Why, reader, in 1812, the year we are now arrived at, as
well as for some years previous, I have been chiefly studying German
metaphysics, in the writings of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, etc. And I
still take opium? On Saturday nights. And, perhaps, have taken it
unblushingly ever since "the rainy Sunday," and "the Pantheon," and
"the beatific druggist" of 1804? Even so. And how do I find my health
after all this opium-eating? in short, how do I do? Why, pretty well,
I thank you, reader; in the phrase of ladies in the straw, "as well as
can be expected." In fact, if I dared to say the real and simple truth
(it must not be forgotten that hitherto I thought, to satisfy the
theories of medical men, I ought to be ill), I was never better in my
life than in the spring of 1812; and I hope sincerely that the
quantity of claret, port, or "particular Madeira," which in all
probability you, good reader, have taken and design to take for every
term of eight years during your natural life, may as little disorder
your health as mine was disordered by opium I had taken for the eight
years between 1804 and 1812. To this moderation and temperate use of
the article I may ascribe it, I suppose, that as yet at least (that
is, in 1812) I am ignorant and unsuspicious of the avenging terrors
which opium has in store for those who abuse its lenity. At the same
time I have been only a _dilettante_ eater of opium; eight years'
practice even, with the single precaution of allowing sufficient
intervals between every indulgence, has not been sufficient to make
opium necessary to me as an article of daily diet. But now comes a
different era. Move on, if you please, reader, to 1813. In the summer
of the year we have just quitted I had suffered much in bodily health
from distress of mind connected with a very melancholy event. This
event, being no ways related to the subject now before me further than
through bodily illness which it produced, I need not more particularly
notice.  Whether this illness of 1812 had any share in that of 1813 I
know not; but so it was, that in the latter year I was attacked by a
most appalling irritation of the stomach, in all respects the same as
that which had caused me so much suffering in youth, and accompanied
by a revival of all the old dreams. This is the point of my narrative
on which, as respects my own self-justification, the whole of what
follows may be said to hinge. And here I find myself in a perplexing
dilemma. Either, on the one hand, I must exhaust the reader's patience
by such a detail of my malady and of my struggles with it as might
suffice to establish the fact of my inability to wrestle any longer
with irritation and constant suffering, or, on the other hand, by
passing lightly over this critical part of my story, I must forego the
benefit of a stronger impression left on the mind of the reader, and
must lay myself open to the misconstruction of having slipped by the
easy and gradual steps of self-indulging persons from the first to the
final state of opium-eating (a misconstruction to which there will be
a lurking predisposition in most readers from my previous
acknowledgments). Be not so ungenerous as to let me suffer in your
good opinion through my own forbearance and regard for your comfort.
No; believe all that I ask of you, viz., that I could resist no
longer. Whether, indeed, afterward, I might not have succeeded in
breaking off the habit, even when it seemed to me that all efforts
would be unavailing, and whether many of the innumerable efforts which
I _did_ make might not have been carried much further, and my
gradual re-conquests of ground lost might not have been followed up
much more energetically, these are questions which I must
decline. Perhaps I might make out a case of palliation; but--shall I
speak ingenuously?--I confess it, as a besetting infirmity of mine,
that I am too much of an Eudæmonist; I hanker too much after a state
of happiness, both for myself and others; I can not face misery,
whether my own or not, with an eye of sufficient firmness; and am
little capable of encountering present pain for the sake of any
reversionary benefit.

The issue of the struggle in 1813 was what I have mentioned; and from
this date the reader is to consider me as a regular and 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. Now then, reader,
from 1813, where all this time we have been sitting down and
loitering, rise up, if you please, and walk forward about three years
more. Now draw up the curtain, and you shall see me in a new
character.

This year which we have now reached, stood, I confess, as a
parenthesis between years of a gloomier character. It was a year of
brilliant water (to speak after the manner of jewellers), set, as it
were, and insulated in the gloom and cloudy melancholy of
opium. Strange as it may sound, I had a little before this time
descended suddenly, and without any considerable effort, from three
hundred and twenty grains of opium (that is, eight [Footnote: I here
reckon twenty-five drops of laudanum as equivalent to one grain of
opium, which I believe is the common estimate. However, as both may be
considered variable quantities (the crude opium varying much in
strength, and the tincture still more), I suppose that no
infinitesimal accuracy can be had in such a calculation. Tea-spoons
vary as much in size as opium in strength. Small ones hold about one
hundred drops--so that eight thousand drops are about eighty times a
tea-spoonful.] thousand drops of laudanum) per day to forty grains, or
one-eighth part. Instantaneously, and as if by magic, the cloud of
profoundest melancholy which rested upon my brain, like some black
vapors that I have seen roll away from the summits of mountains, drew
off in one day; passed off with its murky banners as simultaneously as
a ship that has been stranded and is floated off by a spring tide--

  "That moveth altogether, if it move at all."

Now, then, I was again happy. I now took only one thousand drops of
laudanum per day--and what was that? A latter spring had come to close
up the season of youth. My brain performed its functions as healthily
as ever before. I read Kant again, and again I understood him, or
fancied that I did. Again my feelings of pleasure expanded themselves
to all around me. And, by the way, I remember about this time a little
incident, which I mention because trifling as it was the reader will
soon meet it again in my dreams, which it influenced more fearfully
than could be imagined. One day a Malay knocked at my door. What
business a Malay could have to transact among English mountains I can
not conjecture, but possibly he was on his road to a sea-port about
forty miles distant.

The servant who opened the door to him was a young girl born and bred
among the mountains, who had never seen an Asiatic dress of any
sort. His turban, therefore, confounded her not a little; and as it
turned out that his attainments in English were exactly of the same
extent as hers in the Malay, there seemed to be an impassable gulf
fixed between all communication of ideas, if either party had happened
to possess any. In this dilemma, the girl, recollecting the reputed
learning of her master (and doubtless giving me credit for a knowledge
of all the languages of the earth, besides perhaps a few of the lunar
ones), came and gave me to understand that there was a sort of demon
below whom she clearly imagined that my art could exorcise from the
house. I did not immediately go down, but when I did the group which
presented itself--arranged as it was by accident--though not very
elaborate, took hold of my fancy and my eye in a way that none of the
statuesque attitudes exhibited in the ballets at the opera-house,
though so ostentatiously complex, had ever done. In a cottage kitchen,
but panelled on the wall with dark wood that from age and rubbing
resembled oak, and looking more like a rustic hall of entrance than a
kitchen, stood the Malay, his turban and loose trowsers of dingy white
relieved upon the dark panelling. He had placed himself nearer to the
girl than she seemed to relish, though her native spirit of mountain
intrepidity contended with the feeling of simple awe which her
countenance expressed as she gazed upon the tiger-cat before her. And
a more striking picture there could not be imagined than the beautiful
English face of the girl, and its exquisite fairness, together with
her erect and independent attitude, contrasted with the sallow and
bilious skin of the Malay, enamelled or veneered with mahogany by
marine air, his small, fierce, restless eyes, thin lips, slavish
gestures, and adorations. Half hidden by the ferocious-looking Malay
was a little child from a neighboring cottage, who had crept in after
him and was now in the act of reverting its head and gazing upward at
the turban and the fiery eyes beneath it, while with one hand he
caught at the dress of the young woman for protection.

My knowledge of the Oriental tongues is not remarkably extensive,
being, indeed, confined to two words--the Arabic word for barley and
the Turkish for opium (madjoon), which I have learned from
Anastasius--and as I had neither a Malay dictionary, nor even
Adelung's "Mithridates," which might have helped me to a few words, I
addressed him in some lines from the Iliad; considering that of such
language as I possessed, the Greek, in point of longitude, came
geographically nearest to an Oriental one. He worshiped me in a devout
manner, and replied in what I suppose was Malay. In this way I saved
my reputation with my neighbors, for the Malay had no means of
betraying the secret He lay down upon the floor for about an hour and
then pursued his journey. On his departure I presented him with a
piece of opium. To him, as an Orientalist, I concluded that opium must
be familiar, and the expression of his face convinced me that it
was. Nevertheless, I was struck with some little consternation when I
saw him suddenly raise his hand to his mouth, and (in the school-boy
phrase) bolt the whole, divided into three pieces, at one
mouthful. The quantity was enough to kill three dragoons and their
horses, and I felt some alarm for the poor creature. But what could be
done?  I had given him the opium in compassion for his solitary life,
on recollecting that if he had travelled on foot from London it must
be nearly three weeks since he could have exchanged a thought with any
human being. I could not think of violating the laws of hospitality by
having him seized and drenched with an emetic, and thus frightening
him into a notion that we were going to sacrifice him to some English
idol. No; there was clearly no help for it. He took his leave, and for
some days I felt anxious; but as I never heard of any Malay being
found dead, I became convinced that he was used [Footnote: This,
however, is not a necessary conclusion; the varieties of effect
produced by opium on different constitutions are infinite. A London
magistrate (Harriot's "Struggles through Life," vol. iii. p. 391,
third edition) has recorded that, on the first occasion of his trying
laudanum for the gout, he took FORTY drops, the next night SIXTY, and
on the fifth night EIGHTY, without any effect whatever, and this at an
advanced age. I have an anecdote from a country surgeon, however,
which sinks Mr. Harriot's case into a trifle.] to opium, and that I
must have done him the service I designed by giving him one night of
respite from the pains of wandering.

This incident I have digressed to mention because this Malay (partly
from the picturesque exhibition he assisted to frame, partly from the
anxiety I connected with his image for some days) fastened afterward
upon my dreams, and brought other Malays with him, worse than himself,
that ran "a-muck" [Footnote: See the common accounts, in any Eastern
traveller or voyager, of the frantic excesses committed by Malays who
have taken opium or are reduced to desperation by ill luck at
gambling.] at me, and led me into a world of troubles.

And now, reader, we have run through all the ten categories of my
condition as it stood about 1816-1817, up to the middle of which
latter year I judge myself to have been a happy man.

But now farewell, a long farewell to happiness, winter or summer!
farewell to smiles and laughter! farewell to peace of mind! farewell
to hope and to tranquil dreams, and to the blessed consolations of
sleep! For more than three years and a half I am summoned away from
these. I am now arrived at an Iliad of woes, for I have now to record
_the pains of opium._

Reader, who have thus far accompanied me, I must request your
attention to a brief explanatory note on three points:

1. For several reasons I have not been able to compose the notes for
this part of my narrative into any regular and connected shape. I give
the notes disjointed as I find them, or have now drawn them up from
memory. Some of them point to their own date, some I have dated, and
some are undated. Whenever it could answer my purpose to transplant
them from the natural or chronological order I have not scrupled to do
so. Sometimes I speak in the present, sometimes in the past tense. Few
of the notes, perhaps, were written exactly at the period of time to
which they relate; but this can little affect their accuracy, as the
impressions were such that they can never fade from my mind.  Much has
been omitted. I could not, without effort, constrain myself to the
task of either recalling or constructing into a regular narrative the
whole burden of horrors which lies upon my brain. This feeling partly
I plead in excuse, and partly that I am now in London, and am a
helpless sort of person who can not even arrange his own papers
without assistance, and I am separated from the hands which are wont
to perform for me the offices of an amanuensis.

2. You will think, perhaps, that I am too confidential and
communicative of my own private history. It may be so.  But my way of
writing is rather to think aloud and follow my own humors than much to
consider who is listening to me; and if I stop to consider what is
proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt
whether any part at all is proper. The fact is, I place myself at a
distance of fifteen or twenty years ahead of this time, and suppose
myself writing to those who will be interested about me hereafter; and
wishing to have some record of a time, the entire history of which no
one can know but myself, I do it as fully as I am able with the
efforts I am now capable of making because I know not whether I can
ever find time to do it again.

3. It will occur to you often to ask, Why did I not release myself
from the horrors of opium by leaving it off or diminishing it? To this
I must answer briefly--it might be supposed that I yielded to the
fascinations of opium too easily; it can not be supposed that any man
can be charmed by its terrors. The reader may be sure, therefore, that
I made attempts innumerable to reduce the quantity. I add, that those
who witnessed the agonies of those attempts, and not myself, were the
first to beg me to desist. But could not I have reduced it a drop a
day, or by adding water have bisected or trisected a drop? A thousand
drops bisected would thus have taken nearly six years to reduce, and
that would certainly not have answered. But this is a common mistake
of those who know nothing of opium experimentally. I appeal to those
who do, whether it is not always found that down to a certain point it
can be reduced with ease and even pleasure, but that after that point
further reduction causes intense suffering. Yes, say many thoughtless
persons, who know not what they are talking of, you will suffer a
little low spirits and dejection for a few days. I answer, no; there
is nothing like low spirits; on the contrary, the mere animal spirits
are uncommonly raised, the pulse is improved, the health is better. It
is not there that the suffering lies. It has no resemblance to the
sufferings caused by renouncing wine. It is a state of unutterable
irritation of stomach (which surely is not much like dejection),
accompanied by intense perspirations, and feelings such as I shall not
attempt to describe without more space at my command.

I shall now enter "_in medias res_" and shall anticipate, from a
time when my opium pains might be said to be at their _acme_, an
account of their palsying effects on the intellectual faculties.

My studies have now been long interrupted. I can not read to myself
with any pleasure, hardly with a moment's endurance; yet I read aloud
sometimes for the pleasure of others, because reading is an
accomplishment of mine--and in the slang use of the word
_accomplishment_, as a superficial and ornamental attainment,
almost the only one I possess--and formerly, if I had any vanity at
all connected with any endowment or attainment of mine, it was with
this, for I had observed that no accomplishment was so rare. Of late,
if I have felt moved by any thing in books, it has been by the grand
lamentations of Sampson Agonistes, or the great harmonies of the
Satanic speeches in "Paradise Regained," when read aloud by myself.

For nearly two years I believe that I read no book but one; and I owe
it to the author, in discharge of a great debt of gratitude, to
mention what that was. The sublimer and more passionate poets I still
read, as I have said, by snatches and occasionally, but my proper
vocation, as I well knew, was the exercise of the analytic
understanding. Now, for the most part, analytic studies are
continuous, and not to be pursued by fits and starts, or fragmentary
efforts. Mathematics, for instance, intellectual philosophy, etc.,
were all become insupportable to me; I shrunk from them with a sense
of powerless and infantine feebleness that gave me an anguish the
greater from remembering the time when I grappled with them to my own
hourly delight; and for this further reason, because I had devoted the
labor of my whole life, and had dedicated my intellect, blossoms, and
fruits to the slow and elaborate toil of constructing one single work,
to which I had presumed to give the title of an unfinished work of
Spinoza's, viz., "_De Emendatione Humani Intelectus_." This was
now lying locked up, as by frost, like any Spanish bridge or aqueduct,
begun upon too great a scale for the resources of the architect; and,
instead of surviving me as a monument of wishes at least, and
aspirations, and a life of labor dedicated to the exaltation of human
nature in that way in which God had best fitted me to promote so great
an object, it was likely to stand a memorial to my children of hopes
defeated, of baffled efforts, of materials uselessly accumulated, of
foundations laid that were never to support a superstructure, of the
grief and the ruin of the architect. In this state of imbecility I had
for amusement turned my attention to political economy. In 1819 a
friend in Edinburgh sent me down Mr. Ricardo's book; and, recurring to
my own prophetic anticipation of the advent of some legislator for
this science, I said, before I had finished the first chapter, "Thou
art the man!" Wonder and curiosity were emotions that had long been
dead in me. Yet I wondered once more: I wondered at myself that I
could once again be stimulated to the effort of reading; and much more
I wondered at the book.

Thus did one simple work of profound understanding avail to give me a
pleasure and an activity which I had not known for years--it roused me
even to write, or at least to dictate what M. wrote for me. It seemed
to me that some important truths had escaped even "the inevitable eye"
of Mr. Ricardo; and as these were for the most part of such a nature
that I could express or illustrate them more briefly and elegantly by
algebraic symbols than in the usual clumsy and loitering diction of
economists, the whole would not have filled a pocket-book; and being
so brief, with M. for my amanuensis, even at this time, incapable as I
was of all general exertion, I drew up my "Prolegomena to all Future
Systems of Political Economy." I hope it will not be found redolent of
opium; though, indeed, to most people, the subject itself is a
sufficient opiate.

This exertion, however, was but a temporary flash, as the sequel
showed; for I designed to publish my work. Arrangements were made at a
provincial press about eighteen miles distant for printing it. An
additional compositor was retained for some days on this account. The
work was even twice advertised, and I was, in a manner, pledged to the
fulfillment of my intention. But I had a preface to write, and a
dedication--which I wished to make a splendid one--to Mr.  Ricardo. I
found myself quite unable to accomplish all this. The arrangements
were countermanded, the compositor dismissed, and my "Prolegomena"
rested peacefully by the side of its elder and more dignified brother.

I have thus described and illustrated my intellectual torpor in terms
that apply, more or less, to every part of the four years during which
I was under the Circean spells of opium. But for misery and suffering,
I might, indeed, be said to have existed in a dormant state. I seldom
could prevail on myself to write a letter; an answer of a few words to
any that I received was the utmost that I could accomplish, and often
_that_ not until the letter had lain weeks, or even months, on my
writing-table. Without the aid of M.  all records of bills paid, or
_to be_ paid, must have perished, and my whole domestic
economy--whatever became of Political Economy--must have gone into
irretrievable confusion.  I shall not afterward allude to this part of
the case.

It is one, however, which the opium-eater will find in the end as
oppressive and tormenting as any other, from the sense of incapacity
and feebleness, from the direct embarrassments incident to the neglect
or procrastination of each day's appropriate duties, and from the
remorse which must often exasperate the stings of these evils to a
reflective and conscientious mind. The opium-eater loses none of his
moral sensibilities or aspirations; he wishes and longs as earnestly
as ever to realize what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted
by duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible
infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of power
to attempt. 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.

I now pass to what is the main subject of these latter confessions, to
the history and journal of what took place in my dreams; for these
were the immediate and proximate cause of my acutest suffering.

The first notice I had of any important change going on in this part
of my physical economy was from the re-awaking of a state of eye
generally incident to childhood or exalted states of irritability. I
know not whether my reader is aware that many children, perhaps most,
have a power of painting, as it were, upon the darkness, all sorts of
phantoms.  In some that power is simply a mechanic affection of the
eye; others have a voluntary or semi-voluntary power to dismiss or
summon them; or as a child once said to me when I questioned him on
this matter, "I can tell them to go, and they go; but sometimes they
come when I don't tell them to come." Whereupon I told him that he had
almost as unlimited a command over apparitions as a Roman centurion
over his soldiers. In the middle of 1817, I think it was, that this
faculty became positively distressing to me. At night, when I lay
awake in bed, vast processions passed along in mournful pomp; friezes
of never-ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn as
if they were stones drawn from times before Œdipus or Priam, before
Tyre, before Memphis. And at the same time a corresponding change took
place in my dreams; a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up
within my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than
earthly splendor. And the four following facts may be mentioned as
noticeable at this time:

I. That as the creative state of the eye increased, a sympathy seemed
to arise between the waking and the dreaming states of the brain in
one point--that whatsoever I happened to call up and to trace by a
voluntary act upon the darkness was very apt to transfer itself to my
dreams, so that I feared to exercise this faculty.

II. For this, and all other changes in my dreams, were accompanied by
deep-seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy, such as are wholly
incommunicable by words. I seemed every night to descend, not
metaphorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless
abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I
could ever re-ascend. Nor did I, by waking, feel that I had
re-ascended.  This I do not dwell upon, because the state of gloom
which attended these gorgeous spectacles--amounting at last to utter
darkness, as of some suicidal despondency--can not be approached by
words.

III. The sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were both
powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, etc., were exhibited in
proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space
swelled and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This,
however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time. I
sometimes seemed to have lived for seventy or one hundred years in one
night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium
passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits
of any human experience.

IV. The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later
years, were often revived. I could not be said to recollect them, for
if I had been told of them when waking I should not have been able to
acknowledge them as parts of my past experience; but placed as they
were before me, in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all their
evanescent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I _recognized_
them instantaneously. I was once told by a near relative of
mine, that having in her childhood fallen into a river, and
being on the very verge of death but for the critical assistance
which reached her, she saw in a moment her whole life, in its minutest
incidents, arrayed before her simultaneously as in a mirror; and she
had a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and
every part. This, from some opium experiences of mine, I can
believe. I have, indeed, seen the same thing asserted twice in modern
books, and accompanied by a remark which I am convinced is true, viz.,
that the dread book of account which the Scriptures speak of is in
fact the mind itself of each individual. Of this, at least, I feel
assured, that there is no such thing as _forgetting_ possible to
the mind. A thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between
our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the mind;
accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but alike,
whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains forever--just as
the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day, whereas in
fact we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a
veil, and that they are waiting to be revealed when the obscuring
day-light shall have withdrawn.

And now came a tremendous change, which unfolding itself slowly like a
scroll through many months, promised an abiding torment; and, in fact,
it never left me until the winding up of my case. Hitherto the human
face had often mixed in my dreams--but not despotically, nor with any
special power of tormenting--but now that which I have called the
tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself.  Perhaps some part
of my London life might be answerable for this. Be that as it may, now
it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began
to appear; the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces, upturned to
the heavens; faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upward by
thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries: my agitation was
infinite, my mind tossed, and surged with the ocean.

_May_, 1818.--The Malay has been a fearful enemy for months. I
have been every night, through his means, transported into Asiatic
scenes. Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical
sunlights I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles,
all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all
tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or
Indostan. From kindred feelings I soon brought Egypt and all her gods
under the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered
at by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was
fixed for centuries at the summit or in secret rooms: I was the idol;
I was the priest; I was worshiped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the
wrath of Bramah through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me;
Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had
done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled
at. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies
and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I
was kissed with cancerous kisses by crocodiles, and laid, confounded
with all unutterable slimy things, among reeds and Nilotic mud.

I thus give the reader some slight abstraction of my Oriental dreams,
which always filled me with such amazement at the monstrous scenery
that horror seemed absorbed for a while in sheer astonishment. Sooner
or later came a reflux of feeling that swallowed up the astonishment
and left me not so much in terror as in hatred and abomination of what
I saw. Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless
incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove me
into an oppression as of madness. Into these dreams only it was, with
one or two slight exceptions, that any circumstances of physical
horror entered.  All before had been moral and spiritual terrors. But
here the main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles,
especially the last. The cursed crocodile became to me the object of
more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with
him, and (as was always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries. I
escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses with cane
tables, etc. All the feet of the tables, sofas, etc., soon became
instinct with life. The abominable head of the crocodile and his
leering eyes looked out at me multiplied into a thousand repetitions,
and I stood loathing and fascinated. And so often did this hideous
reptile haunt my dreams that many times the very same dream was broken
up in the very same way: I heard gentle voices speaking to me (I hear
every thing when I am sleeping), and instantly I awoke. It was broad
noon, and my children were standing hand in hand at my bedside, come
to show me their colored shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them
dressed for going out. I protest that so awful was the transition from
the damned crocodile and the other unutterable monsters and abortions
of my dreams to the sight of innocent _human_ natures and of
infancy, that in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind I wept, and
could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces.

It now remains that I should say something of the way in which this
conflict of horrors was finally brought to its crisis. The reader is
already aware that the opium-eater has, in some way or other,
"unwound, almost to its final links, the accursed chain which bound
him." By what means? To have narrated this according to the original
intention would have far exceeded the space which can now be
allowed. It is fortunate, as such a cogent reason exists for abridging
it, that I should on a maturer view of the case have been exceedingly
unwilling to injure by any such unaffecting details the impression of
the history itself as an appeal to the prudence and the conscience of
the yet unconfirmed opium-eater, or even (though a very inferior
consideration) to injure its effect as a composition. The interest of
the judicious reader will not attach itself chiefly to the subject of
the fascinating spells, but to the fascinating power. Not the
opium-eater, but the opium is the true hero of the tale, and the
legitimate centre on which the interest revolves. The object was to
display the marvellous agency of opium, whether for pleasure or for
pain. If that is done, the action of the piece has closed.

However, as some people in spite of all laws to the contrary will
persist in asking what became of the opium-eater, and in what state he
now is, I answer for him thus: The reader is aware that opium had long
ceased to found its empire on spells of pleasure; it was solely by the
tortures connected with the attempt to abjure it that it kept its
hold.  Yet as other tortures, no less it may be thought, attended the
non-abjuration of such a tyrant, a choice only of evils was left; and
_that_ might as well have been adopted, which, however terrific
in itself, held out a prospect of final restoration to happiness. This
appears true; but good logic gave the author no strength to act upon
it. However, a crisis arrived for the author's life, and a crisis for
other objects still dearer to him, and which will always be far dearer
to him than his life, even now that it is again a happy one. I saw
that I must die if I continued the opium. I determined, therefore, if
that should be required, to die in throwing it off.  How much I was at
that time taking I can not say; for the opium which I used had been
purchased for me by a friend who afterward refused to let me pay him,
so that I could not ascertain even what quantity I had used within a
year.  I apprehend, however, that I took it very irregularly, and that
I varied from about fifty or sixty grains to one hundred and fifty a
day. My first task was to reduce it to forty, to thirty, and, as fast
as I could, to twelve grains.

I triumphed. But think not, reader, that therefore my sufferings were
ended, nor think of me as of one sitting in a _dejected_
state. Think of me as of one, even when four months had passed, still
agitated, writhing, throbbing, palpitating, shattered; and much,
perhaps, in the situation of him who has been racked, as I collect the
torments of that state from the affecting account of them left by a
most innocent sufferer [William Lithgow] of the time of James
I. Meantime I derived no benefit from any medicine except one
prescribed to me by an Edinburgh surgeon of great eminence, viz.,
ammoniated tincture of valerian. Medical account, therefore, of my
emancipation I have not much to give, and even that little, as managed
by a man so ignorant of medicine as myself, would probably tend only
to mislead. At all events it would be misplaced in this situation. The
moral of the narrative is addressed to the opium-eater, and therefore
of necessity limited in its application. If he is taught to fear and
tremble, enough has been effected. But he may say that the issue of my
case is at least a proof that opium, after a seventeen years' use and
an eight years' abuse of its powers, may still be renounced; and that
he may chance to bring to the task greater energy than I did, or that
with a stronger constitution than mine he may obtain the same results
with less.  This may be true. I would not presume to measure the
efforts of other men by my own. I heartily wish him more energy; I
wish him the same success. Nevertheless, I had motives external to
myself which he may unfortunately want, and these supplied me with
conscientious supports which mere personal interests might fail to
supply to a mind debilitated by opium.

Jeremy Taylor conjectures that it may be as painful to be born as to
die. I think it probable; and during the whole period of diminishing
the opium I had the torments of a man passing out of one mode of
existence into another. The issue was not death, but a sort of
physical regeneration, and I may add that ever since, at intervals, I
have had a restoration of more than youthful spirits, though under the
pressure of difficulties, which in a less happy state of mind I should
have called misfortunes.

One memorial of my former condition still remains: my dreams are not
yet perfectly calm; the dread swell and agitation of the storm have
not wholly subsided; the legions that encamped in them are drawing
off, but not all departed; my sleep is tumultuous, and like the gates
of Paradise to our first parents when looking back from afar, it is
still, in the tremendous line of Milton--

    "With dreadful faces throng'd and fiery arms."

The preceding narrative was written by De Quincey in the summer of
1821. In December of the next year a further record of his experience
was published in the form of the following _Appendix._

Those who have read the "Confessions" will have closed them with the
impression that I had wholly renounced the use of opium. This
impression I meant to convey, and that for two reasons: first, because
the very act of deliberately recording such a state of suffering
necessarily presumes in the recorder a power of surveying his own case
as a cool spectator, and a degree of spirits for adequately describing
it which it would be inconsistent to suppose in any person speaking
from the station of an actual sufferer; secondly, because I, who had
descended from so large a quantity as eight thousand drops to so small
a one, comparatively speaking, as a quantity ranging between three
hundred and one hundred and sixty drops, might well suppose that the
victory was in effect achieved. In suffering my readers, therefore, to
think of me as of a reformed opium-eater, I left no impression but
what I shared myself, and, as may be seen, even this impression was
left to be collected from the general tone of the conclusion and not
from any specific words, which are in no instance at variance with the
literal truth. In no long time after that paper was written I became
sensible that the effort which remained would cost me far more energy
than I had anticipated, and the necessity for making it was more
apparent every month. In particular I became aware of an increasing
callousness or defect of sensibility in the stomach, and this I
imagined might imply a scirrhous state of that organ either formed or
forming. An eminent physician, to whose kindness I was at that time
deeply indebted, informed me that such a termination of my case was
not impossible, though likely to be forestalled by a different
termination in the event of my continuing the use of opium. Opium,
therefore, I resolved wholly to abjure as soon as I should find myself
at liberty to bend my undivided attention and energy to this
purpose. It was not, however, until the 24th of June last that any
tolerable concurrence of facilities for such an attempt arrived. On
that day I began my experiment, having previously settled in my own
mind that I would not flinch, but would "stand up to the scratch"
under any possible "punishment." I must premise that about one hundred
and seventy or one hundred and eighty drops had been my ordinary
allowance for many months. Occasionally I had run up as high as five
hundred, and once nearly to seven hundred. In repeated preludes to my
final experiment I had also gone as low as one hundred drops, but had
found it impossible to stand it beyond the fourth day, which, by the
way, I have always found more difficult to get over than any of the
preceding three. I went off under easy sail--one hundred and thirty
drops a day for three days; on the fourth I plunged at once to
eighty. The misery which I now suffered "took the conceit" out of me
at once, and for about a month I continued off and on about this mark;
then I sunk to sixty, and the next day to--none at all. This was the
first day for nearly ten years that I had existed without opium. I
persevered in my abstinence for ninety hours; that is, upward of half
a week. Then I took--ask me not how much; say, ye severest, what would
ye have done?  Then I abstained again; then took about twenty-five
drops; then abstained; and so on.

Meantime the symptoms which attended my case for the first six weeks
of the experiment were these enormous irritability and excitement of
the whole system--the stomach, in particular, restored to a full
feeling of vitality and sensibility, but often in great pain;
unceasing restlessness night and day; sleep--I scarcely knew what it
was--three hours out of the twenty-four was the utmost I had, and that
so agitated and shallow that I heard every sound that was near me;
lower jaw constantly swelling; mouth ulcerated; and many other
distressing symptoms that would be tedious to repeat, among which,
however, I must mention one because it had never failed to accompany
any attempt to renounce opium, viz., violent sternutation. This now
became exceedingly troublesome; sometimes lasting for two hours at
once, and recurring at least twice or three times a day. I was not
much surprised at this, on recollecting what I had somewhere heard or
read, that the membrane which lines the nostrils is a prolongation of
that which lines the stomach, whence I believe are explained the
inflammatory appearances about the nostrils of dram-drinkers. The
sudden restoration of its original sensibility to the stomach
expressed itself, I suppose, in this way. It is remarkable, also, that
during the whole period of years through which I had taken opium I had
never once caught cold--as the phrase is--nor even the slightest
cough. But now a violent cold attacked me, and a cough soon after. In
an unfinished fragment of a letter begun about this time to ----, I
find these words: "You ask me to write the ---- ----. Do you know
Beaumont and Fletcher's play of 'Thierry and Theodoret?' There you
will see my case as to sleep; nor is it much of an exaggeration in
other features. I protest to you that I have a greater influx of
thoughts in one hour at present than in a whole year under the reign
of opium. It seems as though all the thoughts which had been frozen up
for a decade of years by opium, had now, according to the old fable,
been thawed at once, such a multitude stream in upon me from all
quarters. Yet such is my impatience and hideous irritability, that for
one which I detain and write down fifty escape me. In spite of my
weariness from suffering and want of sleep I can not stand still or
sit for two minutes together. _'I nunc, et versus tecum meditare
canoros.'"_

At this stage of my experiment I sent to a neighboring surgeon,
requesting that he would come over to see me. In the evening he came,
and after briefly stating the case to him I asked this question:
Whether he did not think that the opium might have acted as a stimulus
to the digestive organs, and

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