I have already spoken of the two ways in which the opium or morphia habit is formed. A patient of a nervous temperament, suffering from some painful or spasmodic disease, is attended by a physician, who administers one of these drugs, by the mouth, rectum, or subcutaneously. The relief to suffering is magical, and persists so long as the effect of the drug lasts. With a return of the pain comes the natural desire to have it relieved, and as the narcotics just spoken of have been found especially efficacious the patient desires its repetition. This may go on for weeks and months, until the disease, of which the pain was but a symptom, is cured, or it may never be cured. At any rate, the patient awakes to the knowledge that he must have his narcotic. Life without it is unbearable, and instead of putting forth an extreme effort of the will, as is done by some, and then and there abandoning its use, the majority allow themselves to drift into this habit of daily intoxication with opium. The majority of habituès first use the drug for the relief of pain, and then find themselves unable to break loose from it. Some seem to be so constituted that a single or a few doses of drugs of this nature light up in them an irresistible desire to continue their use. There seems to be a morbid craving for _something_, exactly what is not known, until the narcotic is tried, when this morbid appetite is satisfied and fixed, and becomes the typical “morbid craving for morphia.” It will be dipsomania, morphia-mania, chloral-mania, hasheesh-mania, according as the one or other drug is presented to the patient in the condition of craving. Some persons are undoubtedly born with, and some acquire, this craving for some narcotic or stimulant. A person knowing this fact can readily see how like putting a match to gunpowder it is to give these people opium or morphine in any form, and how inevitably the reading such a book as that of De Quincey’s would create a longing and open the way to a road that has a certain ending in a life’s bondage. Such as these are to be pitied, and deserve the kindest treatment and the most judicious care. They are like a person who has lost a limb, or is suffering from a cancer. In the one instance they lack a certain something that should be there, and which is necessary to the free, full and proper enjoyment of life; in the other case—the acquired tendency or craving—they have a pernicious addition to the system that threatens them with death. Pity, then, rather than blame, at the same time using every legitimate means to break up both the habit and the tendency. CHAPTER III. GENERAL SYMPTOMS CLASSIFIED AND ANALYZED.