The majority, however, suffer not only pain but prostration of
the most distressing character--a combination as terrible as can be
conceived, since the former will not let the victim remain in one
position for a single minute, and the latter takes away all his own
control of his motion, so that he seems a mere helpless, buffeted mass
of agony--an involuntary devil-possessed, devil-driven body,
consciousness at its keenest, will at its deepest imbecility--almost
fainting with fatigue, unable to limp across the room on legs which
seem dislocated in every joint and broken in a thousand places, yet
unable to stop tossing from side to side, and writhing like a trodden
worm all night, all day, perhaps for weeks.
"Oh!" I have heard the patient say, "would to God this made me
_tired!_ healthily tired, so that I could fall into a minute's
doze!"
The apparatus I have just been describing meets this want. Sometimes
while the leather and iron fists are pegging away and pummelling him
at their hardest, he falls asleep on the machine! It has done for him
all that he had not the strength to do for himself--tired him
healthily.
The remedies I have mentioned are capable of indefinite
combinations. The head of an institution like Lord's Island will want
them all, although any one given case may not require all of them. In
the hands of a thoroughly scientific, skillful man, they form an
armory of means with which such an amount of good can be done as
beggars our imagination. Combined with the most faithful attention to
the patient's diet--the establishment of healthful nutrition, so that
as fast as those abnormal matters which have been clogging the system
get cleared away by Nature's relentless processes of decomposition,
fresh material may be soundly built up into the system to replace the
strength which the fatal stimulant feigned--combined with vigilant,
tender, patient nursing--the means described are probably, in many
cases, adequate of themselves to restore any opium-eater who is
salvable at all. Still, brief as this sketch is, and so far from
making any pretensions to be an exhaustive treatise for the guidance
of the profession, I should fail of presenting even a fair outline of
the treatment which an unusually wide experience with opium-eaters has
convinced me to be the true one, did I not add to the above a few
words regarding the medicinal agents which are of value during the
month of peculiar trial through which Mr. Edgerton is now passing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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