In the morning she rarely smoked all that was put in the pipe, and never enough to put her to sleep. Occasionally she added a little opium to the hemp. She was a mental and bodily wreck. Her gait was tottering, and sometimes she would be forced to go in a direction opposite to that in which she desired to move.
She expressed no desire to be broken of her vice, saying often that if she wished it she could stop without any trouble. I regret exceedingly that her temper and many peculiarities would not permit my studying her case more closely. The urine examined was obtained by catheterization during the semi-cataleptic spell already spoken of.
The mental effect of this drug has been variously described by different authors. Thus, Calkins[103] says:—
“The mental condition is an ideal existence, the most vivid, the most fascinating. Time and space both seem to have expanded by an enormous magnification; pigmies have swelled to giants, mountains have grown out of molehills, days have enlarged to years and ages. De Moria in wending his way one evening to the opera house, seemed to himself to have been three years in traversing the corridor. De Saulcy having once fallen into a state of insensibility following upon incoherent dreamings, fancied he had lived meanwhile a hundred years. Rapidity as well as intensity of thought is a noticeable phenomenon. De Lucca, after swallowing a dose of the paste, saw, as in a flitting panorama, the various events of his entire life, all proceeding in orderly succession, though he was powerless in the attempt to arrest and detain a single one of them for a more deliberate contemplation. Memory is sometimes very singularly modified nevertheless, there being perhaps a forgetfulness, not of the object, but of its name proper, or the series of events that transpired during the paroxysm may have passed away into a total oblivion.
“The normal mental condition is that of an exuberant enjoyance rather than the opposite, that of melancholy and depression, though the transition from the one state to the other may be as extreme as it is swift. Oftener the subject is kept revolving in a delirious whirl of hallucinatory emotions, when images the most grotesque and illusions the drollest and most fantastic crowd along, one upon another, with a celerity almost transcending thought. (Mirza Abdúl Roussac.)
“Command over the will is maintainable, but temporarily only. As self-control declines the mind is swayed by the mere fortuitous vagaries of the fancy; and now it is that the dominant characteristic or mental proclivity has its real apocalypsis. The outward expression may reveal itself under a show of complacency and contentment in view of things around, or suspicion, distrust, or querulousness of disposition may work to the surface, or may be, a lordly hauteur that exacts an unquestioning homage from the ‘profanum vulgus’ by virtue of an affected superiority over common mortals, is the ruling idea of the hour; or peradventure, the erotic impulses may, for the time, overshadow and disguise all others.
“Amid the ever-shifting spectacular scene the sense of personal identity is never perhaps entirely lost, but there does arise in very rare instances the notion of a duality of existence; not the Persian idea precisely, that of two souls occupying one and the same body in a joint stock association, as it were (the doctrine as alluded to by Xenophon, in the story of the beautiful Panthea), but rather the idea of one and the same soul in a duplication or bipartation else, and present in two bodies.”
Many persons who have put themselves once or twice under the influence of this drug claim that no such pleasant effects, but rather torturing and horrible conditions are produced. The results when the drug is taken in this way, like those produced by tobacco on boys who smoke for the first time, should not be taken as a true estimate of the results obtained by the continued use of either.
A curious, interesting and valuable experiment was made upon himself by Dr. H. C. Wood, of Philadelphia, who is especially qualified to undertake and record the results of such an observation.