Opium Eating: An Autobiographical Sketch by an HabituateAnonymous
History
Opium Eating: An Autobiographical Sketch by an Habituate
Anonymous
Opium abuse -- United States; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Prisoners and prisons
Generally, during the day (to recur to the subject in hand), did my
stomach feel like a straight and bottomless pipe, but when I attempted to
eat or drink I felt as though it incorporated a volcano; and every time I
thought of food its whirling, surging contents threatened an eruption and
overflow. Everything eaten seemed perfectly insipid and tasteless, and to
fall flat upon the very bottom of my bowels. The region "round about" my
epigastrium was in a state of communistic insurrection and rebellion.
Nothing digested during this time, or if anything, digestion was very
imperfect. Nothing remained in me long enough to pass through a complete
process of digestion. I did not become hungry. To eat a meal of victuals
was precisely like taking a dose of physic, only much more quick in
operation. I experienced constant flushes of heat and cold (hot flushes
predominating), and was in a continual perspiration, all the secretions
being thrown wide open. My flesh seemed stretched tightly after the third
day, and at night my limbs pained me,--principally my legs below the
knees. I could do, and did, nothing but stand and gaze vacantly; too
nerveless and shattered to attempt any mental labor.
My voice was hollow and weak, and sometimes almost inarticulate. After the
fifth day my remorseful and melancholy thoughts and feelings gave way, to
some extent, to more cheerful ones. I continued ten days without touching
morphia, or anything of the kind. By that time my diarrhoea had ceased,
and my stomach about the region of the epigastrium seemed drawn together
as tightly as if tied in a knot. I had some appetite for food, though not
much, and poor digestion. Everything was still quite tasteless to me. I
craved something eternally which seemed absolutely necessary to make up
the proper constitution of my stomach:--and of my happiness, also, I
should add, for this is the whole truth.
The appetite for morphia, which while I was suffering I was able to
control, grew much sharper after I had reached the tenth day, and my pains
and physical difficulties had subsided, as it were. This is a point which
I have ever observed in my case, namely, that, while undergoing severe
pain or suffering, I have had power to resist appetite and carry out my
purposes against the habit, but so soon as the pain or strain upon me
departed, it left me collapsed in my will and powerless. But, in the
instance under consideration, while my stomach was in a disorganized
condition, the appetite was not near so strong as when I regained a more
natural state, when it returned with an irresistible vigor. I believe the
appetite destroys the will as firmly as I do that God exists.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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