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Every desire is a viper in the bosom ....
-Samuel Johnson, 1763
1
That Samuel Johnson had more than a lexicographical interest in opium is evident from his Dictionary entry on the word, which consists of a virtual essay on the subject. It is borrowed from John Hill's History of the Materia Medica (1751), a work Johnson often cites on medical topics. It reads, in part:
Externally applied it is emollient, relaxing, and discutient, and greatly promotes suppuration. A moderate dose of opium taken internally is generally under a grain, yet custom will make people bear a dram; but in that case nature is vitiated. Its first effect is the making the patient cheerful; it removes melancholy, and dissipates the dread of danger. ... It afterwards quiets the spirits, eases pain, and disposes to sleep. After the effect is over, the pain generally returns in a more violent manner; the spirits become lower than before. . . . An immoderate dose of opium brings on drunkenness, cheerfulness, and loud laughter at first, and, after many terrible symptoms, death itself. Those who have accustomed themselves to an immoderate use of opium, are apt to be faint, idle, and thoughtless.1
During Johnson's lifetime in eighteenth-century England, opium was a popular and easily available drug: as Hill's entry says, "At present it is in high esteem." Unregulated by law, and not associated with addiction, it was prescribed to promote sleep, to relieve pain, to suppress cough, and to treat a variety of stomach ailments. That Johnson himself used opium for medicinal purposes is scarcely to be wondered at. According to his appointed biographer, Sir John Hawkins, however, Johnson's use of opium exceeded its customary and legitimate medicinal purposes: in four passages he suggests (without explicitly stating) that Johnson was addicted to the dangerous drug.2 He writes:
His mind had no counterpoise against those evils of sickness, sorrow, and want, which, at different periods of his life he laboured under, and in some of his writings pathetically laments. Of this misfortune himself was sensible, and the frequent reflections thereof wrought in him a persuasion, that the evils of human life preponderated against the enjoyment of it; and this opinion he would frequently enforce by an observation on the general...