Drugs that enslave : The opium, morphine, chloral and hashisch habits / By H.H. Kane.

  • Kane, H. H. (Harry Hubbell), 1854-
Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Drugs that enslave : The opium, morphine, chloral and hashisch habits / By H.H. Kane. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    scribe opium, it was this drug that the people ate. As morphine came into fashion, it was prescribed largely by the profession and the persons forming the habit at that time, as a rule, ate morphine. Habitues of the opium epoch also resorted to it, finding it so much more powerful than the crude drug, so much less bulky, and it did away with the necessity for calling forth a response to opium from the shattered system by resort to alcoholic stimulants. At the time in which De Quincey, Coleridge, and Southey lived, the people and the profession knew little of the opium habit, save among foreign nations; the habitues were few in number, and, as a consequence, when De Quincey's article appeared, it created a most decided impression on the public mind; an impression not yet effaced, and one which bore with it an incalculable amount of harm. Men and women who had never heard of such a thing, stimulated by curios- ity, their minds filled with the vivid pictures of a state of dreamy bliss, a feeling of full content with the world and all about, tried the experiment, gradually wound them- selves in the silken meshes of the fascinating net, which only too soon proved too strong to admit of breaking. There is no question in my mind that, in writing his Confessions, De Quincey left a large debit on the side of truth, and handed down to succeeding generations a mass of ingenious lies; more pleasantly the fiction, vapor- izing from a laudanum-soaked brain. He must needs seek some justification for his life of willful misery, for the blasted hopes, ambitions and prospects of what might have been a noble career, and he offered the dream life, the fuller development of benevolence, and the many pleasures so fantastically portrayed, as a justification, in part at least, for his sin. Nor does the final confession of the intense pain, the