e voices disappeared
and slowly the other symptoms faded away. The pathological idea of
the telepathic influence lasted a while after the voices had gone
until this idea, too, yielded to suggestion. It still took six
weeks before he himself felt that he was entirely normal.

The way in which the average physician nowadays neglects the simple tool
of suggestive treatment, when it can be used for the protection of
society, is perhaps nowhere so reckless as in the case of the morphinist
and cocainist. To give a typical case of this neglect I may mention that
of a highly intelligent young man who had been in the habit of using
both cocaine and morphine for ten years when at his own request he was
sent to a New York hospital. He had been taking alternately morphine for
a year or two, then cocaine for a year or two, and had sometimes
alternated and sometimes combined both in an irregular way. When he
entered the hospital in May, 1908, he was in a cocaine period and was
taking the enormous dose of one hundred and eighty grains of cocaine
every day. In the hospital they withdrew the drug altogether. During the
first weeks, he was entirely sleepless. They energetically refused him
any substitutes and after six weeks he began to feel comfortable. He
gained steadily in weight and after three months, when he left, he had
gained fifty pounds, felt entirely comfortable, and seemed in all
respects normal again. Before twelve hours had passed after leaving the
hospital, he had again taken thirty grains of cocaine and ten grains of
morphine, and this dose rapidly grew until after a few weeks it again
reached a hundred grains of cocaine and up to sixty grains of morphine a
day. Then came the complete breakdown. If that man in the last two or
three weeks of the hospital treatment, when he felt entirely comfortable
and normal and had gained his normal weight, had received even a slight
suggestive treatment suppressing any desire for cocaine or morphine, he
would easily have been saved. To let such a man after a drug career of
ten years go out again to the places of his old associations, where the
desire had to be stirred up, is inexcusable at a time when
psychotherapeutics has won its triumphs in this field. It might have
been sufficient to give him preventive treatment at least for the first
three days of his freedom. And such a case is typical of hundreds.

The overstrong impulse and overstrong desire finds its counte