clude a confession of one
of the principal faults of my life,--a fault, moreover, which, as a
physician, I ought to have guarded against with the most assiduous and
unwearied care. For no man more than the medical man, is bound to let
his light shine--especially in the matter of general temperance, in such
a manner that others may be benefited by it.

When, in the beginning of my medical career, I attempted to establish a
temperance society, though I was exceedingly free from the charge of
using distilled liquors, according to the tenor and spirit of the
pledge, yet exposed, as I was, to colds, and delicate in constitution,
and above all, particularly liable, in the daily routine of business, to
temptation, I was yet one of those who lay aside one stimulus and retain
or resort to another. I did not, indeed, use my substitute with much
freedom, at first. The example daily before me, which was alluded to in
Chapter LII, was sufficient, one would think, to deter me from excess;
and so it proved. All I did for some time, whenever I had been
peculiarly exposed and feared I had taken cold, was to go and swallow a
small pill--say about a grain--of opium.

But as usually happens in such cases, though the pill seemed to remove
all tendency to cold, or in other words to cure me for the time, the
necessity for recurring to it became more and more frequent and
imperious, till I was, at length, a confirmed opium taker. And
yet--strange to say it--all the while I regarded myself as a rigid
temperance man; nay, I was a violent opposer of the use even of opium as
a daily stimulus, in the case of everybody but myself. My apology
was--and here was the ground of self-deception--that I only used it as
a medicine, or rather as a medical means of prevention.

It is, however, quite obvious to my own apprehension now, that a
substance is hardly entitled to the name of medicine, in any ordinary
sense of the term, which is used nearly or quite every day. Yet to this
stage of opium taking I soon arrived. Nay, I went even much farther than
this, and was, at length, pretty well established in the wretched habit
of using this poisonous drug three times a day.

In the summer of 1830, while under the full habitual influence of opium,
I had a slight attack of dysentery. It even went so far as to derange
all my habits, and to break in, among the rest, upon my opium taking.
Opium or laudanum was, indeed, included in the prescription of my
physician,-