Huckleberry Finn tells his own story in the speech of a half-schooled Missouri boy, some forty or fifty years before the book appeared. After the treasure found at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the Widow Douglas has taken Huck in to civilize him, while her sister Miss Watson drills him in manners and spelling.
Medical tag
Addiction
Compulsive dependence on any substance or behaviour (gambling included).
Works
Alone in Berlin (Jeder stirbt für sich allein, 'Everyone dies for himself alone') opens in Berlin in 1940, as the postwoman Eva Kluge delivers to Otto and Anna Quangel the news that their only son has been killed in the invasion of France. The Quangels live in a tenement at 55 Jablonski Strasse with neighbours who represent the range of life under Nazism: the Persickes, a family of brutal Party loyalists; old Frau Rosenthal, a Jewish widow whose flat is looted and who is hounded until she jumps to her death; and retired judge Fromm, who quietly helps where he can.
Freud's late essay, in German Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ('the uneasiness in culture'), asks why civilized people, who have built so much for their own protection, are so often unhappy. It is written in eight short chapters in a conversational, self-questioning style.
The Confessions is a prayer in thirteen books addressed to God, in which Augustine recounts his life up to his mother's death and then turns to philosophical reflection on memory, time and the creation narrative of Genesis. Books I to IX are autobiographical.
Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order is set out like Euclid: definitions, axioms, numbered propositions, proofs, corollaries and the discursive notes (scholia) where Spinoza speaks most freely. Its five parts lead from God to human blessedness.
In 1996 California voters approved Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, which exempted from state prosecution seriously ill patients and their caregivers who possessed or grew marijuana for medical use on a physician's recommendation. Angel Raich and Diane Monson, two California residents with serious medical conditions, used marijuana on the advice of their doctors.
Humboldt's Gift is narrated by Charlie Citrine, a successful middle-aged Chicago writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and made a fortune from a Broadway hit about the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron von Trenck, which was also made into a film. Now in his fifties, Charlie is distracted, spiritually restless and steadily losing his money.
Charles O. Linder was a licensed physician in Spokane, Washington, registered under the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914. In April 1922 he gave a woman named Ida Casey, whom he knew to be addicted to morphine and cocaine, one tablet of morphine and three of cocaine to take herself over a period of time.
On Liberty asks what limits there are on the power society may legitimately exercise over the individual. Mill opens by observing that the old struggle between subjects and rulers has been transformed by democracy.
On the Road is narrated by Sal Paradise, a young writer living with his aunt in New Jersey, and records a series of journeys back and forth across the United States and into Mexico between 1947 and 1950. The engine of the book is Dean Moriarty, a fast-talking, car-stealing, endlessly restless young man from Denver who seems to Sal the embodiment of a wild, joyous American energy.
The Pensées ('Thoughts') are the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, found after Pascal's death in 1662 as nearly a thousand notes, many on slips of paper threaded together in bundles. Pascal had planned a work that would first unsettle the complacent unbeliever (the honnête homme of polite society) by showing the misery and contradiction of the human condition, then show that Christianity alone explains that condition and offers its remedy.
Section 11721 of California's Health and Safety Code made it a misdemeanor, punishable by at least ninety days in the county jail, for any person to use narcotics or to be addicted to their use. Lawrence Robinson was stopped on a Los Angeles street; two officers testified that they had seen marks on his arms and that he admitted occasional use.
Siddhartha is a short, lyrical novel set in India in the time of the Buddha, following the spiritual journey of a young man who seeks enlightenment through experience rather than doctrine. Siddhartha is the handsome, gifted son of a Brahmin, admired by all and loved by his friend Govinda.
Silas Marner is George Eliot's short novel of a lonely linen-weaver restored to human fellowship by a child. In his youth Silas belonged to a strict dissenting congregation at Lantern Yard in a northern manufacturing town, where he was respected for his piety and for the cataleptic fits the brethren took for spiritual visitations.
Mr. Utterson, a reserved and loyal London lawyer, takes his Sunday walk with his kinsman Richard Enfield, who points out a shabby door in a by-street and tells how, at three one winter morning, he saw a small man trample a little girl and walk on. Caught and threatened, the man paid close to a hundred pounds in compensation with a cheque signed by a respected gentleman.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collects the first twelve short stories about the consulting detective of 221B Baker Street, each narrated by his friend Dr. John Watson. In A Scandal in Bohemia the King of Bohemia hires Holmes to recover a compromising photograph from the singer Irene Adler; Holmes, disguised first as a groom and then as a clergyman, tricks her into revealing its hiding place, but she sees through him and escapes with her new husband, leaving Holmes the admiring loser.
The Anatomy of Melancholy presents itself as a medical treatise, laid out in the scholastic manner of partitions, sections, members and subsections, on 'what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it'. It is also an encyclopedia of Renaissance learning, a compendium of quotation from more than a thousand authors, a satire on human folly, and a consolation for its author and readers.
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is a selection of Lovecraft's tales, edited with notes by the Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, tracing his development from early Poe-influenced pieces to the 'cosmic horror' for which he is known. Lovecraft's central idea is that humanity is an insignificant accident in a vast, indifferent universe, and that knowledge of this truth is enough to destroy sanity.
The Koran, or Quran ('recitation'), is the central scripture of Islam. It consists of 114 chapters called suras, of very unequal length, each made up of verses (ayat).
The Little Prince is told by a pilot who, as a boy of six, drew a boa constrictor digesting an elephant; every grown-up who saw Drawing Number One took it for a hat, and he gave up art for flying. Years later his engine fails in the Sahara, a thousand miles from anyone, with water for about a week.
The Lord of the Rings continues the story begun in The Hobbit. Sixty years after his adventure, Bilbo Baggins leaves the Shire on his eleventy-first birthday and, at Gandalf's urging, leaves his magic ring to his young cousin and heir Frodo.
The Moonstone, subtitled A Romance, tells the story of a great yellow diamond taken from India and the year of suspicion that follows its disappearance from an English country house. A Prologue, drawn from a family paper, describes the storming of Seringapatam in 1799, when the officer John Herncastle seizes the jewel from Tipu Sultan's treasury, killing its guardians; one dying Indian warns that the Moonstone will have its vengeance.
Mary Rowlandson's narrative tells of the eleven weeks and five days she spent as a captive during King Philip's War, the conflict of 1675-1676 between the New England colonies and an alliance of Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc and other Native peoples led in part by the Wampanoag sachem Metacom, whom the English called King Philip. It opens on 10 February 1675, by the Old Style calendar then used in English New England (20 February 1676 in modern reckoning), when a large war party attacks Lancaster, Massachusetts.
The Nicomachean Ethics asks what the human good is and how a life can be shaped toward it. Aristotle begins from the idea that every craft, inquiry and action aims at some good, and that the highest practical good is eudaimonia, often translated happiness or flourishing.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde's only novel, a moral fable told in the polished language of the London drawing room. In the studio of the painter Basil Hallward, the witty Lord Henry Wotton sees an unfinished portrait of an extraordinarily handsome young man and insists on meeting its subject.
The Portable Dorothy Parker collects poems, stories, sketches, reviews and occasional pieces that display Parker's distinctive mixture of speed, polish, cruelty and pain. The volume is not a single narrative but a portable career: the brittle lyrics of disappointed love, the dramatic monologues of women waiting for calls or managing humiliation, the social comedies of parties and hotel rooms, the criticism that makes taste sound conversational, and the political pieces that reveal moral seriousness beneath the pose of urban detachment.
The Power and the Glory is set in an unnamed Mexican state during an anticlerical campaign that has outlawed or driven out Catholic priests. Its central figure is the last active priest in the region, a fugitive known as the whisky priest because of his alcoholism and moral failures.
The Principles of Psychology is a two-volume, 1,400-page textbook that William James spent twelve years writing for Henry Holt's American Science Series. It sets out to treat psychology as a natural science of mental life, studying feelings, desires, cognitions and decisions together with their bodily conditions, while refusing to reduce the mind to physiology or to dissolve it into atoms of sensation.
The Quiet American is narrated by Thomas Fowler, a weary British journalist in French-controlled Vietnam during the First Indochina War. The novel begins after the death of Alden Pyle, a young American official whose innocence, confidence and political theories have made him dangerous.
The Republic begins with a question that never stays small: what is justice, and is the just life happier than the unjust? Socrates meets Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Piraeus.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë's second novel, is told in letters written in 1847 by the farmer Gilbert Markham to his friend and brother-in-law Jack Halford, enclosing a long diary. In the autumn of 1827 a young widow calling herself Mrs. Graham takes rooms in the half-ruined Elizabethan mansion of Wildfell Hall with her small son Arthur and an old servant, Rachel.
The Theory of the Leisure Class, published by Macmillan in New York in 1899, is Thorstein Veblen's study of how wealth, status and consumption shape economic life and taste. Written while he taught at the University of Chicago, during the Gilded Age of American fortunes, it treats the habits of the rich not as personal vices but as institutions with a long evolutionary history, and it describes them in a dry, ironic scientific vocabulary that made the book famous.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. Instead of studying churches, creeds or theology, James studies personal religious experience as a psychologist, drawing on a large collection of first-person documents: diaries, autobiographies, letters and replies to questionnaires.
To Kill a Mockingbird is narrated by Jean Louise Finch, called Scout, looking back as an adult on three years of her childhood, from the summer she was nearly six, in Maycomb, a small, poor county seat in Alabama during the Depression of the 1930s. She lives with her older brother Jem, their widowed father Atticus, a lawyer and state legislator, and Calpurnia, the Black cook who helps raise them.
Treasure Island is narrated mainly by Jim Hawkins, the son of an innkeeper whose ordinary life is transformed when the old pirate Billy Bones comes to the Admiral Benbow inn. Bones brings a sea chest, a map and danger in the form of former shipmates, including Black Dog and the blind beggar Pew.
Twenty Years at Hull-House is Jane Addams's account of her early life and of the settlement house she founded on Chicago's West Side in 1889. The first four chapters are autobiographical.
Utilitarianism is a short defence of the ethical theory Mill inherited from Jeremy Bentham and his own father. It was first published in three instalments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and as a book in 1863.
The Harrison Narcotic Act, signed on 17 December 1914, was written as a revenue law. Anyone who imported, manufactured, sold or dispensed opium, coca leaves or their derivatives had to register with the collector of internal revenue and pay a special tax, and sales had to be made on official order forms.
White Fang follows a wolf-dog from his birth in a cave in the frozen North to a sunny estate in California. The novel opens with two men, Bill and Henry, hauling a coffin across the Yukon wilderness while a starving wolf pack trails them.
Passages
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter V
Pap swears off drink before the new judge, who weeps over his reform; that night he gets drunk, rolls off the porch roof and breaks his arm.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter VI
Pap's delirium tremens in the cabin: visions of snakes, terror of the dead, and his chase of Huck with a clasp-knife.
- Civilization and Its Discontents, Ch. II
Survey of methods of avoiding suffering: intoxication as the crudest and most effective chemical method, with the danger that it wastes energy; killing the drives as in yoga; sublimation; fantasy; flight into neurosis or psychosis; love; beauty.
- Confessions, Book VI.8
Alypius, dragged to the amphitheatre, opens his eyes and becomes intoxicated by the bloodshed, returning compulsively.
- Confessions, Book VIII.5, 8–12
The chain of habit, the divided will, physical agitation in the garden, and the conversion.
- Confessions, Book IX.8
Monica as a girl falls into a habit of sipping wine from the cellar until rebuked by a servant.
- Ethics, Part IV, Props. XLI–XLIV and Notes
Pleasure and pain evaluated by their bodily effects; mirth always good, melancholy always bad, localized stimulation and love capable of excess; fixed ideas as madness.
- Gonzales v. Raich, Opinion of the Court, Part II, paragraph beginning Shortly after taking office in 1969
Surveys the history of federal drug regulation and explains how the five schedules of the Controlled Substances Act sort drugs by potential for abuse, dependence and accepted medical use.
- Gonzales v. Raich, Opinion of the Court, Part V, at the sentence beginning As the Solicitor General confirmed during oral argument
Points to the statutory procedure for reclassifying a Schedule I drug as an avenue for those who believe it has medical value.
- Linder v. United States, Opinion of the Court, paragraph beginning: Obviously, direct control of medical practice in the states is beyond the power of the federal government.
Justice McReynolds holds that the act does not prescribe methods of treating addicts, calls them diseased and proper subjects for treatment, and declines to treat four small tablets as improper medicine.
- Linder v. United States, Opinion of the Court, discussion of Behrman: The opinion cannot be accepted as authority for holding that a physician
The Court confines the 1922 Behrman decision so that physicians acting by fair medical standards may give moderate amounts for self-administration to relieve conditions incident to addiction.
- Linder v. United States, Opinion of the Court, the trial judge's charge beginning: If you are satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that defendant knew that this woman was addicted
The jury instruction distinguishes catering to an addicted person's craving from relieving pain the physician believed in good faith arose from another illness, showing how the line was drawn at trial.
- On Liberty, Ch. V, Applications
Drunkenness as self-regarding unless tied to violence; taxation of stimulants; the opium import ban in China and the Maine Law listed as interferences with buyers.
- On the Road, Part Two
Visit to Old Bull Lee's household near New Orleans, where drug use (including Benzedrine and opiates) is part of daily life.
- Pensees, Fragments 139–143, 164–171, Section II
Diversion: gambling, hunting, war and court office as flight from thought; the king without diversion is wretched; death is easier to bear than the thought of it.
- Robinson v. California, Opinion of the Court, paragraph beginning: It is unlikely that any State at this moment in history would attempt to make it a criminal offense for a person to be mentally ill
Stewart groups addiction with mental illness and infectious disease, contrasting compulsory treatment with criminal punishment.
- Robinson v. California, Concurrence of Justice Douglas, sentence: While afflicted people may be confined either for treatment or for the protection of society, they are not branded as criminals.
Douglas surveys the punishment of the insane in earlier centuries and medical and legislative views of addiction in the 1950s, including whether it is a disease or a symptom of a psychiatric disorder.
- Robinson v. California, Dissent of Justice Clark, sentence: Properly construed, the statute provides a treatment, rather than a punishment.
Clark describes California's two-tier approach, distinguishing incipient volitional addicts from those who had lost self-control and were subject to civil hospital commitment.
- Siddhartha: An Indian Tale, Part Two, 'Samsara'
Siddhartha's gradual decline into gambling, wine and satiety, ending in self-disgust.
- Silas Marner, Chapter XII
Molly's opium habit and her collapse and death in the snow.
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Last Night
Poole reports the repeated notes sent to wholesale chemists demanding a purer sample of a drug, and the men find Hyde dead amid the smell of kernels.
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case
Jekyll wakes with Hyde's hand on the sheet, needs double doses to return, abstains for two months, then relapses into the Carew murder.
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, A Scandal in Bohemia, opening
Watson describes Holmes, alone in Baker Street, alternating between bouts of cocaine and bursts of work on crime.
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Man with the Twisted Lip, opening
Isa Whitney's opium habit, begun after reading De Quincey, with the physical signs of the user; Watson then enters the Bar of Gold opium den in Upper Swandam Lane to bring him home and finds Holmes there in disguise.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 2, Sect. 4, Memb. 2, Subs. 1
Emetic simples, hellebore and antimony, and the double-edged praise and condemnation of tobacco.
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'Dagon'
Narrator's morphine dependence, terror and suicidal resolve after his vision of the sea creature.
- The Koran, Sura 2:219; 5:90–91
Wine and gambling: first described as containing sin and some benefit, later forbidden as works of Satan.
- The Little Prince, Chapter XII
The tippler explains that he drinks to forget his shame, and that he is ashamed of drinking.
- The Lord of the Rings, Book IV, Chapter 2 and following
Gollum's divided talk between Sméagol and Gollum as he argues with himself over the precious.
- The Moonstone, Fourth Narrative
Jennings' journal records his own opium dreams and pain, the preparation of the house, the forty-minim dose, and Franklin's trance-like reenactment.
- The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, The Eighth Remove
Her visit to Metacom, her refusal of his pipe, and her account of having given up tobacco since her capture.
- The Nicomachean Ethics, Book 7
Akrasia examines knowing the better course but acting under appetite or pleasure.
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter XVI
Dorian drives through the night to an opium den by the river, gripped by a physical craving; he meets Adrian Singleton there.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, Big Blonde
Hazel Morse's party persona, drinking, depressive decline and suicide attempt make the story central for alcoholism and gendered despair.
- The Power and the Glory, Village and flight chapters
The priest's craving for alcohol recurs alongside fear, fatigue, hunger and the need to perform sacraments.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter IV: Habit
Plasticity of nervous tissue, practical maxims for breaking bad habits, and the drunkard who excuses each lapse though his nerve cells register it.
- The Quiet American, Saigon domestic chapters
Fowler's opium use accompanies insomnia, detachment and emotional avoidance in a imperial urban setting.
- The Republic, Book 9
The tyrannical soul is ruled by lawless desires, dreams and compulsions.
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Chapter XXII
Huntingdon tells Helen how Lowborough forswore drink but kept a private bottle of laudanum, then relapsed into spirits at the club.
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Chapters XXIX–XXXI
Huntingdon returns from London seasons worn out and irritable, and the gatherings at Grassdale descend into drunken scenes that Helen records.
- The Theory of the Leisure Class, Chapter Four
Intoxicating beverages and narcotics as honorific goods; infirmities from over-indulgence regarded among some peoples as manly attributes.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures IX and X: Conversion
Sudden and gradual conversion explained through subconscious incubation, with cases of drunkards rescued by religious experience, including S. H. Hadley.
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 11
Jem reads to Mrs. Dubose through her fits; after her death Atticus reveals her fight to break her morphine addiction.
- Treasure Island, Admiral Benbow chapters
Billy Bones's heavy drinking, stroke-like collapse and death bring alcohol, vascular crisis and fear into the opening.
- Twenty Years at Hull-House, Chapter XIII, Public Activities and Investigations
The campaign against druggists selling cocaine to minors and the death of a former kindergarten pupil at seventeen.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter II (whether happiness is attainable)
Tranquillity and excitement as the two constituents of a satisfied life; the 'need of excitement' as a disease; selfishness and lack of mental cultivation as the main causes of an unsatisfying life; a passing reference to Novalis's recommendation of suicide.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter IV (will, desire and habit)
Will as 'the child of desire' that can come under the dominion of habit; the example of those 'who have contracted habits of vicious or hurtful indulgence' acting against their own deliberate preference.
- Webb v. United States, Certificate of the Circuit Court of Appeals, sentence beginning: It was Webb's regular cus tom and practice to prescribe morphine for habitual users
The appeals court's description of Webb's practice, contrasting orders intended to cure or break the habit with orders written for continuing use; the stored text splits the word custom.
- Webb v. United States, Opinion of the Court, answer to question three: to call such an order for the use of morphine a physician's prescription
Justice Day's one-sentence holding that a maintenance order is not a prescription, the line later used to restrict physicians treating opiate dependence.
- White Fang, Part IV, Chapter II
Beauty Smith plies Grey Beaver with whisky until the trader's craving consumes his money and goods and he sells White Fang for bottles.
Quotes
“Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks.”
“Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage”
“But, in reality, Avarice, Ambition, Lust, &c., are species of madness, though they may not be reckoned among diseases”
“Drunkenness, for example, in ordinary cases, is not a fit subject for legislative interference”
Frequently cited
“I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber”
“the moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Hyde.”
“I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.”
“alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.”
“He found, as so many more have done, that the practice is easier to attain than to get rid of”
“Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases”
“but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, 'tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul”
“I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more.”
“Rose late, after a dreadful night; the vengeance of yesterday’s opium, pursuing me through a series of frightful dreams.”
“Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state”
“Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar”
“I am determined to enlist all the powers of association in my service;”
“Drunkenness and the other pathological consequences of the free use of stimulants therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as being a mark, at the second remove, of the superior status of those who are able to afford the indulgence.”
“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature”
“Whipping and abuse are like laudanum; you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline.”
“it is only those in whom the need of excitement is a disease, that feel the tranquillity which follows excitement dull and insipid, instead of pleasurable in direct proportion to the excitement which preceded it”
“Will is the child of desire, and passes out of the dominion of its parent only to come under that of habit”
“One of the potencies of whisky is the breeding of thirst.”