The larger share of responsibility then rests on the medical man who prescribes—very properly it may be—this valued drug, though the main measure of his responsibility depends not on the initial using, but upon the case being dismissed without full thought as to the ultimate result of the opiate taking, and with a neglect to warn the patient against the danger of continued using, and insisting upon—giving to this his personal attention—the entire narcotic disusing when the proper need for its taking is ended. Vide “The Genesis of Opium Addiction,” _Detroit Lancet, 1884_, and “The Responsibility of the Profession in the Production of Opium Inebriety,” _Med. and Surg. Reporter, 1878_. Granting this correct, on what principle of equity or right can one be held accountable, and so culpable, for his use of the drug when, unaware of its ensnaring power, and, confiding in the counsel of his medical adviser he avails himself of the relief it affords? Another and most important auxiliary factor obtains in these cases—one of which the laity knows little or nothing, and the profession appreciates less than it should—and that is the power opium possesses to create a necessity of its own. Of this, I venture to assert that no one, other than the subject of a painful personal experience, or of large observation, can form a fully adequate idea. The writer has been studying opium and opium habitués for more than sixteen years, with an annual experience, of late, as regards number of cases, that is probably unequalled in this country, and yet he stands more and more in awe of this peculiar power with every case that comes under his care. Granting a painful physical necessity, and the daily or semi-daily use of opium—especially morphia, subcutaneously—for a few weeks or months, and there are few, if any, who can withstand the ensnaring, enslaving power of this drug. Men stronger of brain and brawn than we have gone down before it. I have known a superbly athletic specimen of physical manhood, able to resist the wintry rigor of a polar expedition, succumb to the power of morphia in less than a month. I have seen a man so generously endowed that he survived the horrors of Salisbury when the death rate averaged eighty per cent., go down before the same resistless power in four weeks. It was my pleasure to see this gentleman recover, and take the lecture platform to tell of his bondage and escape, and this is what he said: