agony of the boots or the thumb-screw without flinching, whose courage
has given way under the less painful but more unendurable punishment
of prolonged imprisonment. In the one case all a man's powers of
resistance are roused; he feels that his manhood is at stake, and he
endures as men will endure when they see that the question how far
they are their own masters, is at issue. There are, I think, a great
number of men and women who would go unflinchingly to the stake in
vindication of a principle, whose resolution, somewhere in the course
of a long, solitary, and indefinite imprisonment, would break down
into a discreditable compromise of opinions for which they were
unquestionably willing to die.

In the same way a man will for a time endure even frightful suffering
in relinquishing a pernicious habit, while he may fail to hold up his
determination against the assaults of the apparently never-ending
irritation, discomfort, pain, and sleeplessness which may be counted
on as being, sometimes at least, among the remoter consequences of the
struggle in which he has engaged. I wish it, however, distinctly
understood that I do not suppose that the experience of others whose
use of opium had been similar to my own, would necessarily correspond
to mine in all or even in many respects. Opium is the Proteus of
medicine, and science has not yet succeeded in tearing away the many
masks it wears, nor in tracing the marvellously diversified aspects it
is capable of assuming. Among many cases of the relinquishment of
opium with which I have been made acquainted, nothing is more
perplexing than the difference of the specific consequences, as they
are exhibited in persons of different temperaments and habits. For
such differences I do not pretend to account. That is the business of
the thoroughly educated physician, and no unprofessional man, however
wide his personal experience, has the right to dogmatize or even to