At the end of the month Mr. Edgerton can sleep with tolerable soundness for half an hour--even an hour at a time, and the sum of all his dozes amount to about four hours out of the twenty-four. He is still nervous, though the painful tigerish restlessness is gone. The pangs of his opium-neuralgia are also gone--or re-appear at long intervals, and much mitigated, to stay but a few minutes. He is in every respect on the upward grade. When his sleep becomes decidedly better, so that most of his night, despite frequent wakings, is consumed in it, he enters on an entirely different stage of his treatment. We stop pulling him down. We begin toning him up.
To the description of this process I need devote but little room. It consists in a gradual cooling of the temperature of his baths--a substitution of the more bracing and invigorating for one after another of the relaxing and soothing forms of treatment. The hot full-bath is discontinued almost entirely, and we replace it by the use of a couple of pailfuls of water at 65-75, doused over the patient; or "the flow," in which the water spreads through a fan-shaped faucet like a funnel with its sides smashed flat and falls over his shoulders; or the salt sponge--all followed by vigorous towel and hand-rubbing until the skin is in a healthy glow. The pack we still employ, wringing the sheet out of water as near the natural temperature as he can comfortably and at once react from. It is an admirable means of equalizing the circulation of our patient and soothing his remaining nervous irritability. We encourage his being in the open air and sunshine as much as is compatible with the season and the weather, and favor his taking exercise in every unexhausting way possible. His appetite will by this time take care of his nutrition with-out much nursing, but we must listen to its caprices and provide it with every thing it thinks it would like. Our sedative medicines may in all likelihood be safely discontinued, and very little indeed of any kind be given him save tonics. In my experience, and that of all others to whom I have recommended them, the very best and most universally to be relied on at this stage are quinine, nux vomica tincture, and pyro-phosphate of iron, together with last, but most important of all, our invaluable stand-by, beef-tea. This may be made more palatable to the fastidious palate which has become palled by a steady month or two of it, by a few whole cloves and shreds of onion, but most people relish its delicious meaty flavor quite as well when it is simply made by chopping lean rump into pieces the size of dice, covering them with cold water in the proportion of about three pints to two pounds, letting the whole stand a couple of hours to soak in a saucepan, then drawing it forward upon the range, where it will gently simmer for ten minutes, and salting and pouring it out just as it comes up to a brisk boil. If the meat be just slightly browned on both sides (not broiled through, remember) before being chopped, the flavor of the tea is to many tastes still more exquisite. Beef-tea should be on the range, ready for patients in our house who need it, at all hours of the day and night, and all the year round. The whole cookery of our establishment must be of the very best. There is no greater mistake than that existing in most sanitary institutions-- stinting in the larder and the kitchen. The best meats, the most skillful, delicate cookery, the freshest of vegetables and fruit, the ability to tempt the capricious palate by all sorts of savory little made dishes--these should always characterize the table of a place where food has to do so much as with us in replacing the fatal supports of the narcotics and stimuli. It will be noticed that neither here nor in my mention of tonics have I referred to alcoholic stimulants. The omission has been intentional. My entire experience has gone to prove that the use of alcohol in any form with opium-eaters undergoing cure is worse than useless, almost invariably redoubling their suffering from loss of opium, and frequently rendering the craving for a return to their curse an incontrollable agony. I therefore leave it entirely out, alike of my pharmacopia and my bill of fare.