Volume 1

Biographic clinics / by George M. Gould.

  • George M. Gould
Date:
1903-
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Biographic clinics / by George M. Gould. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    “ I have suffered much from my eyes since the influenza; some days all but blind, and on some nights roused up for hours by the pain, and still more by the nervous uneasiness besieging them. Sulphate of zinc is all the remedy I have applied.” (1855.) “ The act of stooping has for many years caused me so much illness.” . . . “The stooping kills me.” (About 1856.) “ Whether the fault is in some growing defect of my eyes, or in the badness of such lights as I can command,” etc. . . . “ The letter cost me three-quarters of an hour, under bad candle-light, to decipher.” (Perhaps about 1859.) He was convinced that his “ dreaming tendencies were con¬ stitutional, and not dependent upon laudanum.” According to his own statement (and no man could be more truthful) he had four relapses into the opium habit, 1813 to 1816, 1817 to 1818, 1824 to 1825, and 1841 to 1844. At other times, and after 1844 his use was “moderate, not excessive.” “ He deliberately records his conviction in the latter years of his life, that but for opium he would have been in his grave 30 years before. As to opium in itself and taken in due limit, he will acknowledge nothing save benefit.” (Page.) “ Opium helped to keep active and entire, during so many long years of bodily feebleness, that large and constantly work¬ ing brain—that in a word it fed it—I have no manner of doubt, and further, that the almost singular immunity Mr. De Quincey enjoyed from headache, which in the course of his long life he never knew—a common source of annoyance, oftentimes of misery, to ordinary-living students—was likely enough due to the opium, I also believe. (Dr. Begbie, who attended him in his last illness.) “ I generally found him attempting to read without spec¬ tacles, which he never employed.” (Ibid.) “ He listened with great interest to what was read to him from the morning papers, if he was not able to read himself. . . . When tired of reading, he was read to by, etc. . . . Day
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