belief. I have seen a mere girl of seventeen years take at one dose
thirty grains of morphia, and I know of a woman who took for years
ninety grains a day, and ruined a weak husband, a man of small means, by
the costliness of her habit.

The causes of the torment, which the cessation of the use of morphia
brings about, are interesting. Agonizing pains show that the nerves,
long muffled, have become more acutely sensitive than they were before
the fatal drug was first employed. A host of lesser troubles--insomnia,
pain, and indigestion--attend the cure. I know nothing more pitiful than
such an ordeal, and, despite the most watchful care, I have seen it end
more than once in suicide. When one has watched a woman from whom opium
has been taken away, even with skilful tenderness, roll in agony on the
floor, rend her garments, tear out her hair, or pass into a state of
hysterical mania, the physician is made to feel that no suffering for
which she took the drug can have been as bad as the results to which it
leads. The capacity to suffer, which comes on as we remove the poison,
is almost inconceivable. It lasts long, and is the true difficulty in
the way of forming anew habits of wholesome endurance. The physician who
imagines that his case is well, because he has enabled an opium-taker to
eat, sleep, and be comfortable without use of the sedative, can have
seen little of the future of such people. The oversensitiveness to pain
persists for months, and is a constant temptation. The moral and mental
habits formed under opium--the irresolution, the recklessness, the want
of shame, in a word, the general failure of all that is womanly--need
something more than time to cure. But I am not preaching to the woman
just set free from this bondage to sin, and speak of her only to
emphasize the horror with which I would wish to inspire the well, who
yet may come some day to be the suffering.