Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/87

Rh My own case is possibly an extreme one, though not, I am inclined to think, to the extent of vitiating its application to the majority. My father used tobacco. My grandfather on my mother's side, a physician by profession, whose physical and mental traits I inherit to a considerable extent, was a moderate smoker; whether my paternal grandfather used the weed I have no means of ascertaining. I may add, however, that its use is pretty common among the collateral limbs radiating from the family trunk, and that there is hence no reason for regarding the phenomena in my case as the results of constitutional antagonism to the narcotic.

I have been a smoker, or had been up to July, 1874, for thirteen years, having commenced at the age of twenty-two. During the first three years I was somewhat irregular in my habits, sometimes smoking a pipe, sometimes consuming cigars at the rate of from three to five per day, and sometimes refraining altogether for from three days to a week.

I am of cerebro-muscular temperament; of slender physique, though broad-shouldered; with great physical endurance conjoined to peculiar sensitiveness of nervous organization, am yet not liable to the nervous excitability generally associated with sensitiveness. Opium and its preparations take their normal narcotic effect in very minute doses, inducing languor and drowsiness within a few minutes after administration. No tendency to talk precedes narcotism, nor is the slightest tendency to fantasy developed by the drug. Hasheesh acts in a manner analogous to morphia, bringing on stupor at the moderate dose, but engendering none of those deliciously intangible sensations which are so generally attributed to its action by Bayard Taylor and others who profess to have experimented with it.

Alcoholic stimulants act limitedly as excitants, but powerfully and rapidly as sedatives. I soon fall asleep under the action of whiskey and brandy. Wines, also, are generally sedative; but ale acts as a stimulant to the brain and nerve-centres with unerring certainty of effect, while its sedative action is long postponed and extremely unreliable. Have never used stimulants habitually, or even with ordinary frequency. Have taken morphine in quarter-grain doses, or the equivalent in laudanum, a dozen times, possibly, in the course of as many years. Am regular in my habits, temperate, and accustomed to protracted intellectual effort; inherit a narcotic tendency from my father, which exhibits itself in peculiar psychical phenomena whenever defective nutrition or protracted nervous tension is permitted.

One idiosyncrasy is worth noting at this stage of the narrative. Although I have smoked habitually for ten years, I have never been able to take tobacco in my mouth without violent nausea, or even to retain a cigar between my teeth; and have always been compelled to remove my cigar frequently from my lips and to carry it between my fingers, when not in actual use. In short, the slightest and most