"All this time you continued to absorb an agent which directly acts for what by a paradox may be called fatal conservation of the tissues. Whether through its complexly combined nitrogen, carbon, or both, the drug has interposed itself between your very personal substance and those oxidations by which alone its life can be maintained. It has slowed the fires of your whole system. It has not only interposed but in part it has substituted itself; so that along with much effete matter of the body stored away there always exists a certain undecomposed quantity of the agent which sustains this morbid conservation. [Footnote: I frequently use what hydropaths call "a pack" to relieve opium distress, and with great benefit. After an hour and a half of perspiration, the patient being taken out of his swaddlings, I have found in the water which was used to wash out his sheet enough opium to have intoxicated a fresh subject. This patient had not used opium for a fortnight.]
"When this combination became established, you began losing your appetite because no substitution of fresh matter was required by your body for tissue wrongly conserved. The progressive derangement of your liver manifested itself in increased sallowness of face and cornea; the organ was working on an inadequate vital supply because the organic nervous system was becoming paralyzed; the veins were not strained of that which is the bowels' proper purgative and the blood's dire poison. You had sealed up all but a single excretory passage—the pores of the skin. Perhaps when you had opium first given you you were told that its intent was the promotion of perspiration but did not know the rationale. The only way in which opium promotes perspiration is by shutting up all the other excretory processes of the body, and throwing the entire labor of that function upon the pores. (When the skin gives out the opium-eater is shut up like an entirely choked chimney, and often dies in delirium of blood- poisoning.)
"For a while—the first six years, perhaps—your skin sustained the work which should have been shared by the other organs—not in natural sweat, but violent perspiration, which showed the excess of its action. Then your palms became gradually hornier—your whole body yellower—at the same time that your muscular system grew tremulous through progressively failing nervous supply.
"About this time you may have had some temporary gastric disturbance, accompanied with indescribable distress, loathing at food, and nausea. This indicated that the mucous lining of the stomach had been partially removed by the corrosions of the drug, or that nervous power had suddenly come to a stand-still, which demanded an increase of stimulus.
"Since that time you have been taking your daily dose only to preserve the status in quo. The condition both of your nervous system and your stomach indicate that you must always take some anodyne to avoid torture, and your only anodyne is opium.
"The rest of your life must be spent in keeping comfortable, not in being happy."
Opium-eaters enjoy a strange immunity from other disease. They are not liable to be attacked by miasma in malarious countries; epidemics or contagions where they exist. They almost always survive to die of their opium itself. And an opium death is usually in one of these two manners:
The opium-eater either dies in collapse through nervous exhaustion (with the blood-poisoning and delirium above-mentioned), sometimes after an overdose, but oftener seeming to occur spontaneously, or in the midst of physical or mental agony as great and irrelievable as men suffer in hopeful abandonment of the drug, and with a colliquative diarrhea, by which—in a continual fiery, acrid discharge—the system relieves itself during a final fortnight of the effete matters which have been accumulating for years.
Either of these ends is terrible enough. Let us draw a curtain over their details.
Opium is a corrosion and paralysis of all the noblest forms of life. The man who voluntarily addicts himself to it would commit in cutting his throat a suicide only swifter and less ignoble. The habit is gaining fearful ground among our professional men, the operatives in our mills, our weary sewing-wormen, our fagged clerks, our disappointed wives, our former liquor-drunkards, our very day-laborers, who a generation ago took gin. All our classes from the highest to the lowest are yearly increasing their consumption of the drug. The terrible demands especially in this country made on modern brains by our feverish competitive life, constitute hourly temptations to some form of the sweet, deadly sedative. Many a professional man of my acquaintance who twenty years ago was content with his tri-diurnal "whisky," ten years ago, drop by drop, began taking stronger "laudanum cock-tails," until he became what he is now—an habitual opium-eater. I have tried to show what he will be. If this article shall deter any from an imitation of his example or excite an interest in the question—"What he shall do to be saved?"—I am content.