It was the following day before the patient was sufficiently coherent to speak lucidly to anyone, and he was somewhat surprised, though obviously pleased to see me at his bedside when I visited the ward after my own surgery was over. He was still in a state of some confusion, he seemed to think he had been on a journey by train, though he could not remember where to, and he was obsessed with the thought that he had killed a girl. He said his mind was ‘full of blood’ and that he could not close his eyes without seeing the blood of his victim ‘seeping down the drain’.
All these things I put down to the hallucinogenic effect of his laudanum overdose, blind fool that I was! I reassured him that he was suffering from a minor and temporary form of dementia brought on by the use of too much laud
