THE AUTHOR’S EXPERIENCE WITH THE DRUG HABIT
My opportunities for observation in this field have extended over fourteen years of constant study. They have included investigations in the Orient and Europe as well as in the United States, and have dealt with patients of every class. Early in my work I found it difficult to secure subjects, and presently saw that I could do so only by personally searching the under-world for them.
It was a complicated task, full of unexpected problems. As I could not engage salaried people for the carrying out of the details of the treatment, it became necessary for me to do everything except the medical work, and to assume all except the medical responsibility. But what I at first deemed a hardship proved in the end to be an advantage, for if I had had plenty of money with which to carry on my work, I should never have mastered its details.
It may be that the need for making the work strictly self-supporting from the start led to one of my first important psychological discoveries: that any person worth saving is either able to pay a reasonable amount for treatment or can make the price of it a deferred obligation of such a character that it will certainly be met. The experience from which this and other statements in this book have been deduced is not an experience gained from casual or even regular daily calls of a few minutes or a few hours upon the patients under treatment, but is due to years in which I have frequently spent twenty-two hours out of every twenty-four in the same building with them, and subject to their constant call.
After having proved the efficacy of treatment at home it seemed advisable to make a journey to the Orient, where drug habits were notoriously more common than elsewhere. It was the desire to study them at first hand and literally by wholesale which led me to China, where I opened three hospitals, and in the course of eleven months supervised the treatment for the opium habit of over four thousand Chinese. During this period I treated all who presented themselves, the ages of those to whom relief was given ranging from eighteen to seventy-six. Among the four thousand patients not one fatality occurred, although many of them were extreme cases, and I was able to obtain the assistance of only one foreign physician who could be considered responsible. The rest of the work was done by untrained Chinese boys, who administered the capsules at stated hours, and not one of whom was capable of intelligently counting a patient’s pulse.
I have said that not one fatality occurred. It is pleasant for me to add that during the whole fourteen years of my practice, although I have had thousands under treatment, many of them in exceedingly bad physical condition at the time the treatment was begun, with their drug symptoms complicated by various and serious physical ailments and often accented by alcoholism, only four cases have died.
SUCCESSFUL ACHIEVEMENTS IN THE CURE OF DRUG-USERS
A new precedent has been established with cases of this character in the course of my hospital experience. For the first time the treatment has been reduced to a definite hospital system, during which the resident physician is never divorced from his patient, and in the course of which complete and elaborate bedside histories and charts are kept. I have in my possession at the present moment the complete bedside notes of every patient to whom my treatment has ever been administered. I call attention to this fact because it shows that the work has not been hit or miss, but has been as carefully systematized and made as highly scientific as it has been possible to make it.
A second precedent has been set, as is proved by the fact that within a brief time any case of drug or alcoholic habit that is not complicated by physical disabilities due to other causes can be successfully treated in a few days without heroic methods and without risk.