He is immediately undressed and put to bed, with hot bricks and blankets at the extremities, and the galvanic battery is judiciously administered by placing both feet in contact with a copper plate constituting the negative electrode, while the operator grasps the positive in one hand, and having wetted the fingers of the other, follows the spine downward, exerting gentle pressure with them as he goes. "Judiciously," I say, because there is a vast deal of injudicious use of the battery. In many cases, for instance, a powerful and spasmodic current is used to the absolute injury of the patient, where the greatest benefit might be secured by an even one so light as scarcely to be perceptible. But I can only mention the battery. Its application is by itself a science, and demands a book. The practitioner who treats opium patients needs that science as much as any one interested in whatsoever branch of nervous therapeutics. The battery in the hands of a scientific man is one of our most powerful adjuncts throughout every stage of treatment, both of opium-eating and its sequelae. Paralysis following the habit, and persistent long after its abandonment, I have cured by it when all other means failed. Here, however, we have only room to indicate the weapons in our armory.
If Mr. Edgerton's digestive apparatus is still as intolerant as at the commencement of the attack which hurried him to Lord's Island, we may hope for a marked mitigation of this symptom, in the use of the battery by passing a mild current transversely through him in the region of the solar plexus. As soon as it is possible for his stomach to retain any thing we administer a bolus of _capsicum_, compounded of five grains of the powder with any simple addition like mucilage and and liquorice to make it a coherent mass. The remaining nausea and irritability will in great likelihood be speedily relieved as by magic, and with these will disappear some of the most distressing cerebral symptoms--the horror and frenzy or comatose apathy among them. In few cases will a patient reach the Island in time for the advantageous use of _belladonna_. That is a direct antidote--exerting its function in antagonism to the earlier toxical effects of the opium. In cases where a single overdose has worked the difficulty and produced the coma which Mr. Edgerton's now resembles, it may be given to an old _habitué_ of the drug with as good advantage as to a person whose overdose is his first experience of opium. It is of especial value where the absorbents have carried the excess beyond the reach of an emetic, any time, indeed, within fifteen or twenty hours after the overdose, when sulphate of zinc and the stomach-pump have failed to bring the poison. If our patient on the Island has taken his overdose so recently, and it seems still worth while to act by antidote, we shall be obliged to get over the difficulty presented by his stomach's lack of retention by administering our belladonna in the form of _atropin_ in solution as a hypodermic injection. The many eminent researches of late made in this interesting method of administering remedies, and the practitioner's own judgment, must guide him as to the proportions of his dose--whether one-fortieth grain, one-twentieth, or larger. Of this operation, with opium-eaters, I have seen several most successful instances.