It was at the end of about fifteen years that my circumstances were such that I felt in position to leave off work and take the long anticipated “cure.” The institution selected was one whose methods seemed most reasonable. I stated to the specialist that I was anxious to be cured as rapidly as possible, and was willing to undergo whatever was necessary, to the limit of my endurance. The three weeks that followed I remember as a horrid nightmare of mental and physical agony. The method was not intended to be harsh, and the physician was well-intentioned, though far from scientific. In my desire for rapid recovery I overestimated my powers of endurance and my nervous system sustained a shock from which it has never recovered, but I persisted, with the assistance of my wife who remained with me and without whose assistance I should have lost my reason. When I left the sanitarium I was no longer an “addict,” but a wretched neurasthenic. Naturally the possibility of returning to my practice in this condition was not to be thought of so I began making plans to spend the winter in southern California. Here again the fates interposed. It was the autumn when the sudden financial panic swept the country, wrecking the fortunes of so many and tying up the resources of so many others. I was among the latter. There was nothing for me to do but to return to practice which I did after a further rest of six weeks--I need not add that in a short time I was again depending upon the drug to sustain me in the work that I was obliged to resume. During the next five years I directed every energy towards shaping my affairs with the one end in view--that of retiring from practice and getting permanently well. By this time my two sons had finished their education and were established. My income was sufficient to provide us with the comforts, if not the luxuries of life. So with a heavy heart, but with a feeling of gratification, I abandoned the practice that I had acquired and sustained through so many years of bitter and sometimes heart-rending struggles. My hopes for speedy restoration were doomed to disappointment. I should have realized that when release suddenly came from the long years of daily combat with so powerful an antagonist, a decided reaction must be the natural sequence. It came in the form of an almost complete prostration, that only by force of will prevented from permanently overcoming me; but more than two years elapsed before I felt equal to the effort of again submitting myself to treatment.