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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_.