Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/352

336 patient passes the days and nights of writhing, the sleeplessness, the restlessness, the thirst, and endless vomitings and purgings; his vain pleadings for liberty, for morphia, for anything which will relieve the intolerable anguish! These clinical notes of Levinstein's, in form cold and terse as a hardware catalogue, are fairly burning with their burden of tragedy. But this treatment he offers as the best known, and its attendant sufferings he evidently believes are inevitable in any cure!

It has happened to me to know, through personal experience, that the unfortunate victim of this "habit" can be freed from his bondage without passing through such an ordeal.

I had been an habitué ten years, having reached at the end of that period the daily amount of thirty-six grains of gum-opium, taken only into the stomach. The "habit" had been begun by a very small amount, and its increase had been extremely gradual. I knew not where to turn for help in effecting a cure: one thing seemed certain, it could not be done without help. At a venture merely, I called upon the late Dr. George M. Beard, feeling that, at any rate, I should be free from the risk of charlatanism; and I shall always remember him with gratitude, for it was through his recommendation that I placed myself under the care of another physician, who immediately undertook the treatment of my case.

The gentleman whom, through the good fortune of Dr. Beard's introduction, I thus came to know, I found to be a young man in the prime of good health and spirits, and one who at once inspired me with that confidence so important in such a case. His residence, it was manifest, was no ordinary "institute" or "asylum." I was simply a courteously received guest in a private family. Here were two bright children quietly pursuing their games when I first entered; and I was soon introduced to a pleasant circle embracing the cultivated ladies of the doctor's family, as well as the three who were to undertake the new path simultaneously with myself. Among these good fellows, as I soon found them to be, I was a simple layman in a medical "ring" as it were, for my comrades were young physicians, each under the hypodermic spell, doctors though they were, helpless like myself in the well-riveted chains. In this situation it is in no wise easy to follow the injunction, "Physician, heal thyself."

Placed in these easy and pleasant relations, with every comfort, and—a most important material consideration—an appetizing table, everything outward was calculated to inspire a feeling of freedom and cheerfulness. I speak particularly of these favorable surroundings, for they seem to me to form a very important accessory of the treatment.

This treatment differed in important respects from preconceived ideas, such as are fostered by almost everything written upon the subject. The patient here, for instance, was under no surveillance and