If you are urgent, weak of will, unable through
unrestraint to comprehend him, the fault will be only half his, if you
plead too eagerly for help and too constantly claim the relief he holds.

But suppose that the woman I address is a long and true sufferer, and
that the physician desires to use such help often, then comes her time
of peril and his day of largest responsibility. If he be weak, or too
tender, or too prone to escape trouble by the easy help of some
pain-lulling agent, she is soon on the evil path of the opium, chloral,
or chloroform habit. Nor is prevention easy. With constant or inconstant
suffering comes weakness of mind as well as body, and none but the
strongest natures pass through this ordeal of character unhurt. If the
woman be unenduring and unthoughtful, if the doctor fail to command her
faith, and be too sympathetic, at last she gets possession herself of
the drug, or the drug and the hypodermatic needle. Then there is before
her one of the saddest of the many downward paths which lead to
destruction of body and soul.

More often, in my experience, the opium habit is learned during an
illness of limited duration, and for the consequences of which there is
always some one to be blamed.

As I remember these patients, and I have seen them by the score, far on
in their evil ways, such women are most often those who lack the power,
even in health, to endure pain. Some defect of training or of nature has
made pain, or even distress or insomnia, ills to be relieved at once
regardless of cost. Let them but feel that relief for the time is
possible, and self-restraint is over. They will have the thing they
crave. You cure them of the vile opium habit at awful cost of suffering,
and they relapse on the first new trial of endurance, and men of their
type more surely than women.

I see a good many cases of opium, morphia, or chloral habit, and I am
sure that these forms of intoxication are becoming more prevalent than
they were a generation ago. Is this due to an increase in the disorders
which are eased by such drugs? Is it not rather due to the softening
influence of luxury, and the fact that we are all being constantly
trained to feel that it is both easy and our right to escape pain,
however brief?

I am sure, too, that a part of it lies in the readiness with which many
physicians give sedatives, and their failure to feel the vast moral
responsibilities of their position. But, whatever be the cause