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} which I inhabit, which had about this time
attained its maximum, July having been, as usual, a month of incessant
rain in our most rainy part of England.
Under these reasons for doubting whether opium had any connexion with the
latter stage of my bodily wretchedness--except, indeed, as an occasional
cause, as having left the body weaker and more crazy, and thus
predisposed to any mal-influence whatever--I willingly spare my reader
all description of it; let it perish to him, and would that I could as
easily say let it perish to my own remembrances, that any future hours of
tranquillity may not be disturbed by too vivid an ideal of possible human
misery!
So much for the sequel of my experiment.
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