As in the opium and morphine habits, only more so, business is abandoned, friendship broken, family ties sundered, and unless relieved the victim sinks into a state of slobbering insanity or acute mania, finally ending in death through hemorrhage, exhaustion, or from the satisfaction of a suicidal tendency. Physical wrecks, guided by shattered mental rudders, they sink out of sight or go to pieces through accidents incident to their own self-produced restlessness. Thirty-eight of my correspondents report the production of insanity by the habitual use of this drug, as follows:— Acute mania, 8 Melancholia, 16 “Insanity,” 3 Silliness, childishness, etc., 11 -- 38 In many cases where I wrote for more full and positive information I received no reply. THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. On the nervous system the effect of chloral, when habitually used, is quite as decided and injurious as upon the mind. These symptoms may be classed as:— (_a_) Those affecting the nerves themselves. (_b_) Those affecting other organs, or systems, through the medium of the nervous apparatus supplying them. To the first class belong anæsthesia and hyperæsthesia, usually of _parts_ of the body only. These may and do extend to the mucous, as well as to the cutaneous surfaces, as evidenced by gastralgia, loss of taste, incontinence and irritability of the bladder and sexual organs, etc., to be more fully considered a little further on. Neuralgic pains are felt here and there, more especially in the neighborhood of, _but not in_, the joints. Mattison[69] and others lay great stress upon this pain, which usually _girdles_ the limb above or below the joint, as a diagnostic mark of the chloral habit. That it is _not_ distinctive of this affection, and occurs in only a few cases, is proven by the fact that out of all the cases I have been able to collect, this symptom appears in but a few—nine—and in not all of these is the pain in the neighborhood of a joint. I have taken special pains to investigate this matter, for the value of a positive diagnostic sign in these affections cannot be underrated. In many of the cases, pains, resembling those of rheumatism or neuralgia, were present, but they did not girdle the limb or occur in the neighborhood of joints.