When I eventually see my first case of the new disease sleeparounditis
I know it won't be any good looking for information in my old textbooks. So I'll struggle with the new journals and even with the Internet until I find some descriptions and experience and outcomes and the results of
any treatments which have ever been tried. It is even possible that some methods have even been effective.A lot of people nowadays who think and worry about illegal drugs have a feeling that this is a new problem. It is not.
Consuming mind-altering drugs has been popular since they were invented. But only among those people who could pay for them. Silk clothes and purple dye, lobsters and ice cream, beautiful girls and pretty boys, sleek horses and
affectionate dogs have always been among the privileges of sober wealth and sensible power. Really nutty billionaires built castles or concentration camps, or bought a few refrigerators to keep the heads of their enemies nice and
fresh.
It was never difficult to combine with these pleasures some opium or heroin or cocaine or whatever powder may be the latest fashion. I remember with left-handed pleasure one of the leading surgeons of 100 years ago;
Professor Halstead of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore not only invented the radical mastectomy procedure for breast cancer, but did so while consuming 6 grains of heroin a day. One sixth of a grain would send me off to
bye-byes for a good four hours. Halstead had his shirts laundered in Paris to preserve his impeccable image.
And in the middle of the nineteenth century every middle-class medicine cupboard was well stocked with laudanum, an
alcoholic tincture of opium which could provide temporary relief from a great many problems.
In 1933, at boarding school in England with measles and double pneumonia at the age of 15, it was no antibiotic which preserved my life,
but heroin to keep down the cough and champagne to keep up the spirits. I never enjoyed either since.
