Usually as early as the third day after its abandonment (unless the constituion has become so impaired by long habituation that there will probably be no vital reaction) opium begins to show its dissolutions from the tissue by a profuse and increasingly acrid bilious diarrhea, which must not be checked if diagnosis has revealed sufficient constitutional vigor to justify any attempt at abandonment of the drug. Hemorrhoids may result; they must be topically treated; mild astringents may be used when the tendency seems getting out of eventual control; bland foods must be given as often as the usually fastidious appetite will tolerate them; the only tonic must be beef-tea--diffusible stimulus invariably increasing the agony, whether in the form of ale, wine, or spirits. Short of threatened collapse, the bowels must not be retarded. There is nothing in the faintest degree resembling a substitute for opium, but from time to time various alleviatives, which can not be discussed in an untechnical article, may be administered with benefit. The spontaneous termination of the diarrhea will indicate that the effete matters we must remove have been mainly eliminated, and that we may shortly look for a marked mitigation of the pain, followed by conditions of great debility but increasingly favorable to the process of reconstruction. That process, yet more than the alleviate, demands a book rather than an article. I have intentionally deferred any description of the agony of the opium struggle, as a _sensation_, until I returned from depicting general symptoms, to relate the particular case which is my text. The sufferings of the patient, from whom I have just returned, are so comprehensive as almost to be exhaustively typical. When simple nervous excitement had for two days alternated with the already mentioned intervals of delirious slumber, a dull, aching sensation began manifesting itself between his shoulders and in the region of the loins. Appetite for food had been failing since the first denial of that for opium. The most intense gastric irritability now appeared in the form of an aggravation of the tympanic tightness, corrosive acid ructations, heart-burn, water-brash, and a peculiar sensation, as painful as it is indescribable, of _self-consciousness_ in the whole upper part of the digestive canal. The best idea of this last symptom may be found by supposing all the nerves of involuntary motion which supply that tract with vitality, suddenly to be gifted with the exquisite sensitiveness to their own processes which is produced by its correlative object in some organ of special sense--the whole organism assimilating itself to a retina or a finger-tip. Sleep now disappeared. This initiated an entire month during which the patient had not one moment of even partial unconciousness.