So little is known, beyond what appears in the following brief notices, of the opium habits of this distinguished philanthropist, that their citation here would be of little service to opium-eaters, except as they tend to show that the regular use of the drug in small quantities may sometimes be continued for many years without apparent injury to the health, while the same difficulty in abandoning it is experienced as attends its disuse by those whose moderation has been less marked.
The son of Wilberforce, in the "Life" of his distinguished father, says: "His returning health was in a great measure the effect of a proper use of opium, a remedy to which even Dr. Pitcairne's judgment could scarcely make him have recourse; yet it was to this medicine that he now owed his life, as well as the comparative vigor of his later years. So sparing was he always in its use, that as a stimulant he never knew its power, and as a remedy for his specific weakness he had not to increase its quantity during the last twenty years he lived. 'If I take,' he would often say,'but a single glass of wine, I can feel its effect, but I never know when I have taken my dose of opium by my feelings.' Its intermission was too soon perceived by the recurrence of disorder."
In a letter from Dr. Gilman, already quoted in the "Reminiscences of Coleridge," he says, speaking of the difficulty of leaving off opium, "I had heard of the failure of Mr. Wilberforce's case under an eminent physician of Bath," etc.
The case of Wilberforce, however, is thrown into the shade by that of a gentleman now living in New York, whose use of opium has been much more protracted than that of the British philanthropist, and who affirms that opium, instead of weakening his powers of mind or body in any respect, has, on the contrary, been of eminent service to both. The compiler would have been glad, in the general interests of humanity, to omit any reference to this case; but it is a legitimate part of the story he has undertaken to tell; and however this isolated exception to the ordinary results of the opium habit may be perverted as a snare and delusion to others, it can not honestly remain untold. In the compiler's interview with this gentleman, now in the one hundred and third year of his age, he was impressed with the evidences of a physical and mental vigor, and a high moral tone, which is rarely found in men upon whom rests the weight of even eighty years. Whatever may be thought of the convictions of the compiler, as to the enormity of the injury inflicted upon society from the habitual and increasing use of opium, he can not reconcile it to his sense of fairness to omit distinct reference to this most anomalous case. The gentleman in question was born in England in the year 1766, and received his first commission in the army in 1786. Serving his country in almost every military station in the world where the martial drum of England is heard--in India, at the Cape, in the Canadas, on guard over Napoleon at St. Helena--he illustrates, as almost a solitary exception, the fact that a use of opium for half a century, varying in quantity from forty grains daily to many times this amount, does not _inevitably_ impair bodily health, mental vigor, or the higher qualities of the moral nature. The use of opium was commenced by this gentleman in the year 1816, as a relief for a severe attack of rheumatism, and has been continued to the present time, with the exception of a very brief period when an eminent physician of Berlin, at the suggestion of the late Chevalier Bunsen, the Prussian Embassador to Great Britain, endeavored to break up the habit. In this effort he was unsuccessful, and the case remains as a striking illustration of the weakness of that physiological reasoning which would deduce certain phenomena as the invariable consequences of a violation of the fundamental laws of health. Until the chemistry of the living body is better understood, medical science seems obliged to accept many anomalies which it can not explain. About all that can be said of such exceptional cases is this: In the great conflagrations which at times devastate large cities, some huge mass of solid masonry is occasionally seen in the midst of the wide-spread ruin, looking down upon prostrate columns, broken capitals, shattered walls, and the cinders and ashes of a general desolation. The solitary tower unquestionably stands; but its chief utility lies in this,--that it serves as a striking monument of the appalling and wide-spread destruction to which it is the sole and conspicuous exception.