RESPIRATION.
Respiration is rarely affected. In some cases there is shortness of breath on walking fast or going up a long flight of stairs. A low grade bronchitis sometimes exists, as also a short, hacking cough, that seems to come chiefly from irritation in the throat.
THE CIRCULATION.
Circulation is often affected but chiefly through the agency of the nervous system; witness the flushing of the face, and flashes of heat over the body, followed by a cold, exhausting sweat. There is often irregular and weakened action of the heart, and congestion of the brain. The albuminuria already spoken of is due, in all likelihood, to an affection of the vessels of the kidneys, through the nerves supplying them. The blood itself, owing to a general condition of malnutrition and imperfect digestion, is unquestionably deteriorated. In some cases the vessels rupture, giving us purpuric spots on the body and hemorrhage from the kidneys and bowels. Dropsy, which sometimes occurs, is due, in the majority of instances, to variable blood pressure, and a diseased condition of the walls of the vessels, permitting the easy transudition of the watery element of the blood. Headache, flushing of the face, flashes of heat and the like, from suppression of the menses, is seen during the early period of morphia addiction, but later nothing but the nervous symptoms attendant upon this condition are manifested.
THE MIND.
Early in the use of morphia the effects upon the mind are simply those of pleasant exhilaration, a feeling of perfect contentment, good will toward all, increased conversational power and stimulation of the imaginative faculties. Sleep is preceded by a period of luxurious drowsiness, fertile in pleasant retrospective and magnificent anticipation. There is total banishment of pain and care. It is, indeed, the ideal life of a dreamer, moulded and modified according to the temperament and intellectual tendencies of the individual.
As time advances, however, the duration of these periods is found to become shorter, and it is necessary, in order to obtain the same pleasant result, to increase the amount of the drug. It has, also, to be taken oftener. Sleep, when it comes, is less profound, the dreams not so pleasant. Should the patient pass the accustomed time for the drug, the loss is at once felt and the first symptoms of rebellion show themselves. A further and larger dose is taken, to quiet the rebellious demon that rules them, and again comes the pleasure, though not so satisfying as at first. The hours of freedom from the tyrant become shorter and shorter, sleep refuses to come, grave doubts fill the mind, the temper is no longer even and pleasant, but irritable and capricious, pains show themselves in various parts of the body, the nights are long hours of torment, conversation becomes a burden, suspicion shows itself, a desire to be alone is overpowering, better feelings are blunted, benevolence is replaced by selfishness, mental stimulation and exhilarance by torpor. Friends are neglected, the books that were once interesting are no longer so, amusements pall upon the taste, family ties, once so pleasant, are become burdensome, and life a dreary space, marked only by the hour at which the drug is to be taken. The days are filled with repentance, the hours garnished with resolves no sooner made than broken,
“O woeful impotence of weak resolve,”
the nights years of misery and anguish, teeming with horrors beyond the power of tongue or pen to paint. Here is the plaint of one, now freed from his bondage:[7] “The morphia victim dwells, after the first exhilaration is gone, in a realm of phantoms and shadows. I saw sights more terrible than can be imagined. I felt pains that do not belong to any mortal lesion. I have shrieked my terror, but the shriek only awoke a myriad of devils, who had been sleeping till then unseen by me. Four months of morphia addiction sufficed to bring me to this land of horrors, where no joy came or has come since the making of the world. My days were spent in self-indulgences. Alone in my office, in an easy chair, I could, with poetry and interesting therapeutical works, manage quite comfortably to pass the hours away. But let a patient summon me away from home, and my gloom and despondency was almost insupportable. I was tormented by continual self-conflict. Conscious of the weakness of my efforts to emancipate myself, I kept on planning some new mode of attack, in the nerveless hope that I could defeat the Lethean devil whose thews were strong as steel, and yet I knew, as day followed day, and week followed week, in so far as all this mental warfare was concerned, it could bring me no help in my awful bondage.
“No dark imagery can paint the encompassing horrors of those nights of torment that belonged to the last two months of my twelve months’ morphia addiction. Not one hour that I passed in bed between midnight and noon did I know normal sleep. In dreams that seemed more vivid than reality, I entered gloomy caves, and walked for hours over rotten cadavers, sometimes forced to step on them and be overwhelmed with loathsome odors. I saw faces in the weird darkness, sometimes a thousand at once, and each was made of blood-red flame; they flashed and went out. My nightmared brain was chased and haunted by everything that can exist in a vast hell of phantoms.”