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 that the present state of suffering in
the stomach--which manifestly was the cause of the inability to
sleep--might arise from indigestion? His answer was, No: on the
contrary, he thought that the suffering was caused by digestion
itself, which should naturally go on below the consciousness, but
which, from the unnatural state of the stomach, vitiated by so long a
use of opium, was become distinctly perceptible. This opinion was
plausible, and the unintermitting nature of the suffering disposes me
to think that it was true; for if it had been any mere _irregular_
affection of the stomach it should naturally have intermitted
occasionally, and constantly fluctuated as to degree. The intention of
Nature, as manifested in the healthy state, obviously is to withdraw
from our notice all the vital motions--such as the circulation of the
blood, the expansion and contraction of the lungs, the peristaltic
action of the stomach, etc.--and opium, it seems, is able in this as
in other instances to counteract her purposes. By the advice of the
surgeon I tried _bitters_.
For a short time these greatly mitigated the feelings under which I
labored, but about the forty-second day of the experiment the symptoms
already noticed began to retire and new ones to arise of a different
and far more tormenting class. Under these, but with a few intervals
of remission, I have since continued to suffer; but I dismiss them
undescribed tracing circumstantially any sufferings from which it is
removed by too short or by no interval. To do this with minuteness
enough to make the review of any use would be indeed "_infandum
renovare dolorem_," and possibly without a sufficient motive; for,
secondly, I doubt whether this latter state be any way referable to
opium, positively considered, or even negatively; that is, whether it
is to be numbered among the last evils from the direct action of opium
or even among the earliest evils consequent upon a _want_ of
opium in a system long deranged by its use. Certainly one part of the
symptoms might be accounted for from the time of year (August); for,
though the summer was not a hot one, yet in any case the sum of all
the heat _funded_ (if one may say so) during the previous months,
added to the existing heat of that month, naturally renders August in
its better half the hottest part of the year; and it so happened that
the excessive perspiration which even at Christmas attends any great
reduction in the daily quantum of opium, and which in July was so
violent as to oblige me to use a bath five or six times a day, had
about the setting in of the hottest season wholly retired, on which
account any bad effect of the heat might be the more unmitigated.
Another symptom, viz., what in my ignorance I call internal rheumatism
(sometimes affecting the shoulders, etc., but more often appearing to
be seated in the stomach), seemed again less probably attributable
to the opium or the want of opium than to the dampness of the house
which I inhabit, which had about that time attained its maximum, July
having been as usual a month of incessant rain in our most rainy part
of England.
Under these reasons for doubting whether opium had any connection with
the latter stage of my bodily wretchedness--except indeed as an
occasional cause, as having left the body weaker and more crazy, and
thus predisposed to any mal-influence whatever--I willingly spare my
reader all description of it. Let it perish to him; and would that I
could as easily say, let it perish to my own remembrances, that any
future hours of tranquillity may not be disturbed by too vivid an
ideal of possible human misery!
So much for the sequel of my experiment As to the former stage, in
which properly lies the experiment and its application to other cases,
I must request my reader not to forget the reason for which I have
recorded it. This was a belief that I might add some trifle to the
history of opium as a medical agent. In this I am aware that I have
not at all fulfilled my own intentions, in consequence of the torpor
of mind, pain of body, and extreme disgust to the subject which
besieged me while writing that part of my paper; which part being
immediately sent off to the press (distant about five degrees of
latitude), can not be corrected or improved. But from this account,
rambling as it may be, it is evident that thus much of benefit may
arise to the persons most interested in such a history of opium--viz.,
to opium-eaters in general--that it establishes for their consolation
and encouragement the fact that opium may be renounced without greater
sufferings than an ordinary resolution may support, and by a pretty
rapid course of descent.
On which last notice I would remark that mine was _too_ rapid,
and the suffering therefore needlessly aggravated; or rather perhaps
it was not sufficiently continuous and equably graduated. But that the
reader may judge for himself, and above all that the opium-eater who
is preparing to retire from business may have every sort of
information before him, I subjoin my diary.
FIRST WEEK
Drops of Laud.
Monday, June 24....... 130
Tuesday, " 25....... 140
Wednesday, " 26....... 130
Thursday, " 27....... 80
Friday, " 28....... 80
Saturday, " 29....... 80
Sunday, " 30....... 80
SECOND WEEK
Drops of Laud.
Monday, July 1........ 80
Tuesday, " 2........ 80
Wednesday, " 3........ 90
Thursday, " 4........ 100
Friday " 5........ 80
Saturday, " 6........ 80
Sunday, " 7........ 80
THIRD WEEK
Drops of Laud.
Monday, July 8........ 300
Tuesday, " 9........ 50
Wednesday, " 10
Thursday, " 11 Hiatus in
Friday, " 12 MS
Saturday, " 13
Sunday, " 14....... 76
FOURTH WEEK
Drops of Laud.
Monday, July 15....... 76
Tuesday, " 16....... 73-1/2
Wednesday, " 17....... 73-1/2
Thursday, " 18....... 70
Friday, " 19....... 240
Saturday, " 20....... 80
Sunday, " 21....... 350
FIFTH WEEK
Drops of Laud.
Monday, July 22....... 60
Tuesday, " 23.......none.
Wednesday, " 24.......none.
Thursday, " 25.......none.
Saturday, " 27.......none.
Friday, " 26....... 200
What mean these abrupt relapses, the reader will ask, perhaps, to such
numbers as 300, 350, etc.? The _impulse_ to these relapses was
mere infirmity of purpose; the _motive_, where any motive blended
with the impulse, was either the principle of "_reculer pour mieux
sauter_" (for under the torpor of a large dose, which lasted for a
day or two, a less quantity satisfied the stomach, which on awaking
found itself partly accustomed to this new ration), or else it was
this principle--that of sufferings otherwise equal, those will be
borne best which meet with a mood of anger. Now whenever I ascended to
any large dose I was furiously incensed on the following day, and
could then have borne any thing.
The narrative part of De Quincey's "Confessions" by no means exhausts
the story of his suffering as recorded by himself. Scattered through
his miscellaneous papers are to be found frequent references to the
opium habit and its protracted hold upon the system long after the
drug itself had been discarded. The succeeding extracts from his
"Literary Reminiscences" will throw light upon his bodily and mental
condition in the years immediately following his opium struggle:
"I was ill at that time and for years after--ill from the effects of
opium upon the liver, and one primary indication of any illness felt
in that organ is peculiar depression of spirits. Hence arose a
singular effect of reciprocal action in maintaining a state of
dejection. From the original physical depression caused by the
derangement of the liver arose a sympathetic depression of the mind,
disposing me to believe that I never _could_ extricate myself;
and from this belief arose, by reaction, a thousand-fold increase of
the physical depression. I began to view my unhappy London life--a
life of literary toils odious to my heart--as a permanent state of
exile from my Westmoreland home. My three eldest children, at that
time in the most interesting stages of childhood and infancy, were in
Westmoreland, and so powerful was my feeling (derived merely from a
deranged liver) of some long, never-ending separation from my family,
that at length, in pure weakness of mind, I was obliged to relinquish
my daily walks in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens from the misery of
seeing children in multitudes that too forcibly recalled my own.
"Meantime it is very true that the labors I had to face would not even
to myself, in a state of good bodily health, have appeared
alarming. _Myself_, I say, for in any state of health I do not
write with rapidity. Under the influence, however, of opium, when it
reaches its maximum in diseasing the liver and deranging the digestive
functions, all exertion whatever is revolting in excess. Intellectual
exertion above all is connected habitually, when performed under opium
influence, with a sense of disgust the most profound for the subject
(no matter what) which detains the thoughts; all that morning
freshness of animal spirits, which under ordinary circumstances
consumes, as it were, and swallows up the interval between one's self
and one's distant object, all that dewy freshness is exhaled and
burned off by the parching effects of opium on the animal economy.
"I was, besides, and had been for some time engaged in the task of
unthreading the labyrinth by which I had reached, unawares, my present
state of slavery to opium. I was descending the mighty ladder,
stretching to the clouds as it seemed, by which I had imperceptibly
attained my giddy altitude--that point from which it had seemed
equally impossible to go forward or backward. To wean myself from
opium I had resolved inexorably, and finally I accomplished my
vow. But the transition state was the worst state of all to
support. All the pains of martyrdom were there; all the ravages in the
economy of the great central organ, the stomach, which had been
wrought by opium; the sickening disgust which attended each separate
respiration; and the rooted depravation of the appetite and the
digestion--all these must be weathered for months upon months, and
without stimulus (however false and treacherous) which, for some part
of each day, the old doses of laudanum would have supplied. These
doses were to be continually diminished, and under this difficult
dilemma: If, as some people advised, the diminution were made by so
trifling a quantity as to be imperceptible, in that case the duration
of the process was interminable and hopeless--thirty years would not
have sufficed to carry it through. On the other hand, if twenty-five
to fifty drops were withdrawn on each day (that is, from one to two
grains of opium), inevitably within three, four, or five days the
deduction began to tell grievously, and the effect was to restore the
craving for opium more keenly than ever. There was the collision of
both evils--that from the laudanum and that from the want of
laudanum. The last was a state of distress perpetually increasing, the
other was one which did not sensibly diminish--no, not for a long
period of months. Irregular motions, impressed by a potent agent upon
the blood and other processes of life, are slow to subside; they
maintain themselves long after the exciting cause has been partially
or even wholly withdrawn; and, in my case, they did not perfectly
subside into the motion of tranquil health for several years. From all
this it will be easy to understand the _fact_--though after all
impossible, without a similar experience, to understand the
_amount_--of my suffering and despondency in the daily task upon
which circumstances had thrown me at this period--the task of writing
and producing something for the journals, _invita Minerva_. Over
and above the principal operation of my suffering state, as felt in
the enormous difficulty with which it loaded every act of exertion,
there was another secondary effect which always followed as a reaction
from the first. And that this was no accident or peculiarity attached
to my individual temperament, I may presume from the circumstance that
Mr. Coleridge experienced the very same sensations, in the same
situation, throughout his literary life, and has often noticed it to
me with surprise and vexation. The sensation was that of powerful
disgust with any subject upon which he had occupied his thoughts or
had exerted his powers of composition for any length of time, and an
equal disgust with the result of his exertions--powerful abhorrence, I
may call it, absolute loathing of all that he had produced.
"In after years Coleridge assured me that he never could read any
thing he had written without a sense of overpowering disgust. Reverting
to my own case, which was pretty nearly the same as this, there was,
however, this difference--that at times, when I had slept at more
regular hours for several nights consecutively, and had armed myself
by a sudden increase of the opium for a few days running, I recovered
at times a remarkable glow of jovial spirits. In some such artificial
respites, it was, from my usual state of distress, and purchased at a
heavy price of subsequent suffering, that I wrote the greater part of
the opium 'Confessions' in the autumn of 1821.
"These circumstances I mention to account for my having written any
thing in a happy or genial state of mind, when I was in a general
state so opposite, by my own description, to every thing like
enjoyment. That description, as a _general_ one, states most truly the
unhappy condition, and the somewhat extraordinary condition of feeling
to which opium had brought me. I, like Mr. Coleridge, could not endure
what I had written for some time after I had written it. I also shrunk
from treating any subject which I had much considered; but more, I
believe, as recoiling from the intricacy and the elaborateness which
had been made known to me in the course of considering it, and on
account of the difficulty or the toilsomeness which might be fairly
presumed from the mere fact that I _had_ long considered it, or could
have found it necessary to do so, than from any blind mechanical
feeling inevitably associated (as in Coleridge it was) with a second
survey of the same subject. One other effect there was from the opium,
and I believe it had some place in Coleridge's list of morbid
affections caused by opium, and of disturbances extended even to the
intellect, which was, that the judgment was for a time grievously
impaired, sometimes even totally abolished, as applied to any thing I
had recently written. Fresh from the labor of composition, I believe,
indeed, that almost every man, unless he has had a very long and close
experience in the practice of writing, finds himself a little dazzled
and bewildered in computing the effect, as it will appear to neutral
eyes, of what he has produced. But the incapacitation which I speak of
here as due to opium, is of another kind and another degree. It is
mere childish helplessness, or senile paralysis, of the judgment,
which distresses the man in attempting to grasp the upshot and the
total effect (the _tout ensemble_) of what he has himself so recently
produced. There is the same imbecility in attempting to hold things
steadily together, and to bring them under a comprehensive or unifying
act of the judging faculty, as there is in the efforts of a drunken
man to follow a chain of reasoning. Opium is said to have some
_specific_ effect of debilitation upon the memory: [Footnote: The
technical memory, or that which depends upon purely arbitrary links of
connection, and therefore more upon a _nisus_ or separate activity of
the mind--that memory, for instance, which recalls names--is
undoubtedly affected, and most powerfully, by opium. On the other
hand, the _logical_ memory, or that which recalls facts that are
connected by fixed relations, and where A being given, B must go
before or after--historical memory, for instance--is not much affected
by opium.] that is, not merely the general one which might be supposed
to accompany its morbid effects upon the bodily system, but some
other, more direct, subtle, and exclusive; and this, of whatever
nature, may possibly extend to the faculty of judging. Such, however,
over and above the more known and more obvious ill effects upon fhe
spirits and the health, were some of the stronger and more subtle
effects of opium in disturbing the intellectual system as well as the
animal, the functions of the will also no less than those of the
intellect, from which both Coleridge and myself were suffering at the
period to which I now refer (1821-25); evils which found their fullest
exemplification in the very act upon which circumstances had now
thrown me as the _sine qua non_ of my extrication from difficulties--
viz., the act of literary composition. This necessity--the fact of its
being my one sole resource for the present, and the established
experience which I now had of the peculiar embarrassments and
counteracting forces which I should find in opium, but still more in
the train of consequences left behind by past opium--strongly
co-operated with the mere physical despondency arising out of the
liver: and the state of partial unhappiness, among other outward
indications, expressed itself by one mark, which some people are apt
greatly to misapprehend--as if it were some result of a sentimental
turn of feeling--I mean perpetual sighs. But medical men must very
well know that a certain state of the liver, _mechanically_ and
without any co-operation of the will, expresses itself in sighs. I
was much too firm-minded and too reasonable to murmur or complain. I
certainly suffered deeply, as one who finds himself a banished man
from all that he loves, and who had not the consolations of hope, but
feared too profoundly that all my efforts--efforts poisoned so sadly
by opium--might be unavailing for the end.
"In 1824 I had come up to London upon an errand--in itself
sufficiently vexatious--of fighting against pecuniary embarrassments
by literary labors; but, as always happened hitherto, with very
imperfect success, from the miserable thwartings I incurred through
the deranged state of the liver. My zeal was great and my application
was unintermitting, but spirits radically vitiated, chiefly through
the direct mechanical depression caused by one important organ
deranged; and secondly, by a reflex effect of depression, through my
own thoughts in estimating my prospects, together with the aggravation
of my case by the inevitable exile from my own mountain home--all this
reduced the value of my exertion in a deplorable way. It was rare,
indeed, that I could satisfy my own judgment even tolerably with the
quality of any article I produced; and my power to make sustained
exertions drooped in a way I could not control, every other hour of
the day; insomuch that, what with parts to be cancelled, and what with
whole days of torpor and pure defect of power to produce any thing at
all, very often it turned out that all my labors were barely
sufficient (sometimes not sufficient) to meet the current expenses of
my residence in London. Gloomy indeed was my state of mind at that
period, for though I made prodigious efforts to recover my health, yet
all availed me not, and a curse seemed to settle upon whatever I then
undertook. One canopy of murky clouds brooded forever upon my spirits,
which were in one uniformly low key of cheerless despondency."
De Quincey has given his views pretty freely as to the regimen to be
observed by reforming opium-eaters, in a paper on "The Temperance
Movement" which is specially worthy of attention.