"The rest of your life must be spent in keeping comfortable, not in being happy." Opium-eaters enjoy a strange immunity from other disease. They are not liable to be attacked by miasma in malarious countries; epidemics or contagions where they exist. They almost always survive to die of their opium itself. And an opium death is usually in one of these two manners: The opium-eater either dies in collapse through nervous exhaustion (with the blood-poisoning and delirium above-mentioned), sometimes after an overdose, but oftener seeming to occur spontaneously, or in the midst of physical or mental agony as great and irrelievable as men suffer in hopeful abandonment of the drug, and with a colliquative diarrhea, by which--in a continual fiery, acrid discharge--the system relieves itself during a final fortnight of the effete matters which have been accumulating for years. Either of these ends is terrible enough. Let us draw a curtain over their details. Opium is a corrosion and paralysis of all the noblest forms of life. The man who voluntarily addicts himself to it would commit in cutting his throat a suicide only swifter and less ignoble. The habit is gaining fearful ground among our professional men, the operatives in our mills, our weary sewing-wormen, our fagged clerks, our disappointed wives, our former liquor-drunkards, our very day-laborers, who a generation ago took gin. All our classes from the highest to the lowest are yearly increasing their consumption of the drug. The terrible demands especially in this country made on modern brains by our feverish competitive life, constitute hourly temptations to some form of the sweet, deadly sedative. Many a professional man of my acquaintance who twenty years ago was content with his _tri-diurnal_ "whisky," ten years ago, drop by drop, began taking stronger "laudanum cock-tails," until he became what he is now--an habitual opium-eater. I have tried to show what he will be. If this article shall deter any from an imitation of his example or excite an interest in the question--"_What he shall do to be saved?_"--I am content. NOTE.--The patient whose sorrowful case suggested this article died just as the magazine was issued. His unassisted struggle had been too long protracted after abandonment of the drug was evidently hopeless, and his resumption of opium came too late to permit of his rallying from his exhaustion. OUTLINES OF THE OPIUM-CURE. No. 1 Livingston Place, Stuyvesant Square, April 25, 1868. MY DEAR SIR:--In accordance with your request, I sketch the brief outline of my plan for the treatment of opium-eaters, premising that it pretends much less to novelty than to such value as belongs to generalizations made from large experience by sincere interest and careful study in the light of science and common sense.