stomach, it should naturally
have intermitted occasionally, and constantly fluctuated as to degree.
The intention of nature, as manifested in the healthy state, obviously is
to withdraw from our notice all the vital motions, such as the
circulation of the blood, the expansion and contraction of the lungs, the
peristaltic action of the stomach, &c., and opium, it seems, is able in
this, as in other instances, to counteract her purposes. By the advice
of the surgeon I tried _bitters_. For a short time these greatly
mitigated the feelings under which I laboured, but about the forty-second
day of the experiment the symptoms already noticed began to retire, and
new ones to arise of a different and far more tormenting class; under
these, but with a few intervals of remission, I have since continued to
suffer. But I dismiss them undescribed for two reasons: first, because
the mind revolts from retracing circumstantially any sufferings from
which it is removed by too short or by no interval. To do this with
minuteness enough to make the review of any use would be indeed _infandum
renovare dolorem_, and possibly without a sufficient motive; for
secondly, I doubt whether this latter state be anyway referable to
opium--positively considered, or even negatively; that is, whether it is
to be numbered amongst the last evils from the direct action of opium, or
even amongst the earliest evils consequent upon a _want_ of opium in a
system long deranged by its use. Certainly one part of the symptoms
might be accounted for from the time of year (August), for though the
summer was not a hot one, yet in any case the sum of all the heat
_funded_ (if one may say so) during the previous months, added to the
existing heat of that month, naturally renders August in its better half
the hottest part of the year; and it so happened that--the excessive
perspiration which even at Christmas attends any great reduction in the
daily quantum of opium--and which in July was so violent as to oblige me
to use a bath five or six times a day--had about the setting-in of the
hottest season wholly retired, on which account any bad effect of the
heat might be the more unmitigated. Another symptom--viz., what in my
ignorance I call internal rheumatism (sometimes affecting the shoulders,
&c., but more often appearing to be seated in the stomach)--seemed again
less probably attributable to the opium, or the want of opium, than to
the dampness of the house {21}