If there be one set of women more liable than another to become victims
of morphia or chloral, it is the wives of physicians. Every winter I see
four or five, and always it is true that the habit has arisen out of the
effort of the husband to attend medically on his wife. Physicians make
good husbands, and this is in part due to the fact that their knowledge
of the difficulties of feminine life causes them to be more thoughtfully
tender, and more charitable as concerns the effects upon women of
certain inevitable conditions as to which the layman is ignorant or
indifferent. But the very fulness of the husband's appreciation of a
woman's drawbacks and little moral ailments, the outcome of her
womanhood, becomes dangerous when he ventures to be her medical
caretaker. What he coolly decides in another's case, he cannot in hers.
How can he see her suffer and not give her of the abundance of relief in
his hands? She is quick to know and to profit by this, and so the worst
comes of it.

"It is easy for you to sit by in your strength and see me suffer," said
a woman once to me. She was on the verge of the morphia habit, and I was
trying to break it off abruptly. I felt, as any gentle-hearted man must
feel, the sting and hurt of her words. Next day she said to me, "Of
course you were right. I used to talk that way to B----, and he never
could stand it." He was her husband and a physician. She got well
easily.

I do not believe that most women who sin in this way slip into it either
quite so ignorantly and so unwarned as they would have you to suppose.
Nearly always there is a time when some one--the physician, a friend, or
their own reason--bids them pause, reflect, and choose.

"Alas I for thee, if thou from thine own soul dost turn and flee.