The Turks, who, for aught to the contrary that appears in their history, enjoy as good health as the people of the United States, and are said to attain a longevity as great, use opium for the purpose of intoxication, much in the same manner in which the latter employ alcohol and wine, these being forbidden to the former by their creed. Yet, after all, the man who could adduce these facts to prove the harmlessness of the substances under consideration, must be destitute of that physiological knowledge which is necessary to understand the natural operations of the human system.
There is a principle in the animal economy, which powerfully resists morbid impressions, and tends to expel whatever is noxious. This principle, called by some "the medical power of nature," is roused to action by the application of an offending agent to any part of the human system. On the first intimation of the assault, this vigilant sentinel rallies her forces, and flies to the point of attack.
If she succeed in expelling the invader before any serious mischief has been done, the system again reposes in quiet; but if not, a more general tumult arises, and the assistance of art is often required to second her ineffectual efforts. These phenomena are exhibited in the first use of tobacco, in all its forms.
Apply snuff to the nostrils of one unaccustomed to it; and a violent sneezing, with a copious secretion of mucus will follow. Put tobacco into the mouth and it immediately produces a profuse discharge of saliva; and if this proves unsuccessful in expelling the unwelcome intruder, severe nausea and vomiting ensue. Smoking also produces similar effects. Apply the moistened leaves of tobacco to any part of the surface of the body, and its deadly effects are soon perceived in an entire prostration of strength, accompanied with ghastly paleness and vomiting.
If it were not in a high degree poisonous, no such results would follow its first application to the living fibre; for they do not follow the first application of those substances which were, by our wise and bountiful Creator, designed for the use of man.
Though the effects above described are less violent, when the nerves (the media through which it operates) become accustomed to the stimulus of the noxious substance; yet it by no means proves, even in these circumstances, that it does no injury to the system, any more than the fact that some men drink a quart of proof spirit daily without producing death, proves that that amount does them no harm, when half the quantity taken by a beginner would prove fatal.
In the course of twelve years' observation on the effects of narcotics upon the human system, I became acquainted with a delicate female, who, for thirty years, had taken a sufficient quantity of opium daily to kill the hardiest son of New-England, provided he had been unaccustomed to its pernicious influence. She, nevertheless, lived to an advanced age, and was eighty-four years old when I last saw her, though she, at that time, took every day two scruples of solid opium.
I had the unpleasant task to attend this lady in a fit of sickness. And with the exception of a few cases, in which similar results have followed the excessive use of alcohol, it was, without exaggeration, the most troublesome case that has ever fallen under my care.
All the frightful symptoms of delirium tremens waited around and haunted her imagination through the day; while shrieks, and groans, and all the signs of woe attended her nightly couch, to add a gloomy horror to her unrefreshing and broken slumbers. And so far as my observations extend, the most inveterate derangements of the nervous system are either produced or aggravated by the habitual use of narcotics.
The inherent power of the constitution to sustain itself amid the ever-varying changes to which it is exposed, has been learned by common observation, as well by the peasant as by the man of erudition. The fact, that man, "made of one blood, can dwell" in all the varieties of climate, "on the face of the whole earth," and can sustain himself, without any change of organization, at one period on the burning sands of a Numidian desert, at another among the ice-bergs of a Greenland winter—exhibits in the most convincing light the extent of this wonderful power.