The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-06-10
WATCHING MORPHINEFIENDS
NERVE HACKING EXPERIENCE
 OF 4 TRAINED NURSE.

Moral Nature Who Was Cured-Va-
 saries of an AmiabIe Young Man,
 Also Victim.
 Your newspaper women think you have queer experiences sometimes" :" said the trained nurse rather con- temptuously. But you really don't know anything about queer experi- ences."
 "Go on," said the newspaper woman. Tell your story"
 "Wen." said the trained nurse in grumbling tone. don't ever think you have seen life until you have done detective and trained nurse work on the same case.
 T was called one day to a young woman living with her parents in a fashionable residence district. She was widow with an income of S1OO monthly in her own right. She had little boy. He was a beautiful child, and she was, or had been. beautiful woman.
 When I first saw her, every tooth in her head was loose and ulcerated. so that she could take no solid food. Her body was covered with wounds and sears. She would talk for twelve hours t ht stretch and never speak word of truth.
 She would pawn everything she could lay her hands on. and she was filled with suspicion of every one who approached her. She was, in fact, a morphine wreck.
 She had taken the drug first under a physicians orders, to alleviate pain. He had given her a hypodermic syringe and taught her how to use it. Before , her parents knew it she had become a slave. Then they put her under the care of another physician, and he in stalled me to see that his orders were carried out.
 T noticed very soon that she couldn't set her whole foot on the ground. She walked on her toes. That spelled cocaine to me.
 "We watched and found she was talk ing the second drug on cotton wool in her mouth. That made her case es- pecially bad. You shouldn't mix your pizens any more than your drinks. We kept her old prescription for | both drugs, getting them filled at the 1 drug store where she had always sent them. But we got the order of the physician who gave them to have the prescriptions diluted according to the orders of the new doctor.
 "Then we began to reduce the dose little by little with water. The result was very peculiar study of morphine l psychology.
 ''She was thoroughly convinced that she couldn't live without morphine, and she was so suspicious of the new doctor and myself that we had to be | exceedingly careful. have never seen such a set, immovable determination 1 for anything as possessed her to have 1 morphine.
 She demanded her hypodermic regularly, and at the usual time the pains of the physical demand for the drug would overcome her, and she would become nervous and hysterical. l The moment she got the dose she would l be satisfied.
 ! Yet we had reduced that dose until 1 finally she was getting practically pure l water. with just enough morphine in 1t 1 to deaden the pain of the injection. ! Now if you can tell how much of that was mental and how much physical,
 how much real and how much self-de- I naYtiAi3 will In Ln+ I the doctor or I could.
 l within six weeks she could chew beefsteak, and her health was much
 improved. Still we didn't dare to let I her know what had been done. l Her parents had given up the strug- 1 gle as she supposed, and were letting
 her have the drug. If she had really believed otherwise she would have l driven me and the doctor out of the
 house. Yet one day saw plainly that
 she had eluded me in some way and got full dose,
 l "I racked my brains to see how it l could have been done. She had had a l social call during the afternoon, and ] | could not follow her into the drawing room. 1 inquired among the servants l and found she had called up a nlessen-
 ger boy immediately on the departure | of the visitor.
 l 'I went to the nearest A. D. T. office and found the boy who had answered the call. He had, as I suspected, been
 to drug store for her.
 T got the doctors name and went
 to him. He was a young fellow who
 had never treated her professionally | He had called on her socially tha, 1 afternoon, and she had got the ore. scription out of him.
 T got his order on the drug store tc
 dilute the mixture according to my | orders. Then I had to go back to the drug store and fix it up with them. Ii
 took me a solid day to chase that thing l down.
 Fortunately it was so early in the
 treatment that she did not have sense
 enough to detect the difference between the two doses. After that she could
 send her bottle to either place, and they would send her the diluted mixture
 Whenever I had any time off ]
 would spend it tracing things she had pawned and redeem them. She would pawn things that she wanted herself { when she had money in her purse. Ther she would send messenger boys for wine
 and licuors.
 "A trait of morphine poisoning is that ' xyfotty,o 5,.i,aIy