one is simply deprived at once and wholly of opium without any medical
help, unless the use of cold water be considered such.) These symptoms
(unaided by medicine) last, with gradual abatements of virulence, from
twenty to thirty days, and then mostly die away. Not well and right,
however, does one feel, even then. Though for the most part free from
pain, he is yet physically weak, and all corporeal exertion is a
distressing effort. He must needs sleep, too, enormously, going to bed
often at sunset in a July day, and sleeping log-like until six or
seven next morning, and then sleeping with like soundness two or three
hours after dinner. How long it would be before the recovery of his
complete original strength and natural physical tone, personal
experience does not enable me to say. His condition, both in itself
and as relates to others, is meanwhile most strange and anomalous. He
looks, probably, better than ever in his life before. In sufficiently
full flesh, with ruddy cheeks and skin clear as a healthy child's, the
beholder would pronounce him in the height of health and vigor, and
would glow with indignation at seeing him loitering about day after
day, doing little save sleep, in a world where so much work needs to
be done. And yet he feels all but impotent for enterprise, or any
active physical efforts; for there is scarce enough nervous force in
him to move his frame to a lingering walk, and sometimes it seems as
if the nervous fibres were actually pulled out, and he must move, if
at all, by pure force of volition.
Most singular too, the while, is the state of his mind. His power of
thought is keen, bright, and fertile beyond example, and his
imagination swarms with pictures of beauty, while his sensitiveness to
impressions and emotions of every kind is so excessively keen that the
tears spring to his eyes on the slightest occasion. He is a child in
sensibility, while a youth in the vividness, and a man in the grasp,
the piercingness and the copiousness of his thoughts. He can not write
down his thoughts, for his arm and hand are unnerved; but in
conversation or before an audience he can utter himself as if filled
with the breath of inspiration itself.
INSANITY AND SUICIDE FROM AN ATTEMPT TO ABANDON MORPHINE.
The account which follows is abridged from advance proof-sheets of a
narrative, written for separate publication, by Dr. L. Barnes, of
Delaware, Ohio, by whose courtesy a portion of his article appears in
these pages.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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