Fitz Hugh Ludlow - Final Years

Final Years

The last years of Ludlow’s life seem to have been a constant struggle with addiction. Family letters, when they mention him, usually either hopefully discuss his latest release from habit or mourn his latest relapse. His cousin wrote in March 1870, that “Dr. Smith has been treating him for a while but he said to a lady the other day — that there was no use in his wasting his strength Mr. Ludlow, for he took a teaspoonful of morphine in a glass of whisky every day — and while he persisted in doing that it was only time & strength thrown away...”

His writing focus, as well as the focus of his life, turned to the problem of opium addiction. He described this as “one of my life’s ruling passions — a very agony of seeking to find — any means of bringing the habituated opium-eater out of his horrible bondage, without, or comparatively without, pain.” His essay What Shall They Do to be Saved from Harper’s was included in the 1868 book (written by Horace Day, himself a recovering addict) The Opium Habit, one of the first books to deal in a medical way with opium addiction, which had become a national crisis in the wake of the Civil War. Ludlow expanded on his original essay with Outlines of the Opium Cure, a portrait in words of an ideal, perhaps utopian, drug addiction treatment clinic.

The opium addict, according to Ludlow (in a view which even today seems progressive), “is a proper subject, not for reproof, but for medical treatment. The problem of his case need embarrass nobody. It is as purely physical as one of small-pox.... is suffering under a disease of the very machinery of volition; and no more to be judged harshly for his acts than a wound for suppurating or the bowels for continuing the peristaltic motion.”

Ludlow’s writings led addicts from all over the country to write for advice, and he spent a great deal of time in his last years answering this correspondence. He also treated addicts as a physician, and one friend said that “I have known him to go for three weeks at a time without taking off his clothing for sleep, in attendance upon the sick. His face was a familiar one in many a hospital ward.... During the last weeks of his residence in New York, he supported, out of his scanty means, a family of which one of the members had been a victim to opium. This family had no claim upon him whatever excepting that of the sympathy which such misfortunes always excited in him. The medicines and money he furnished this single family in the course of the several weeks that I knew about them, could not have amounted to less than one hundred dollars, and this case was only one of many.”

But Ludlow himself was unable to break the habit. The same friend writes,

Alas, with what sadness his friends came to know that while he was doing so much to warn and restore others from the effects of this fearful habit, he himself was still under its bondage. Again and again he seemed to have broken it. Only those most intimate with him knew how he suffered at such periods... I recall a night he passed with me some months after the publication of . He was in an excited state, and we took a long walk together, during which he spoke freely of his varied trials, and he finally went to my house to sleep. I went directly to bed, but he was a long time making his preparations, and I at length suspected he was indulging his old craving. For the first and only time in my life I spoke harshly to him, and characterized his abuse of himself and of the confidence of his friends as shameful. He replied depreciatingly, and turning down the gas-light came around and crept into bed beside me. We both lay a moment in silence, and feeling reproved for my harshness, I said: “Think, Fitz, of your warnings on the subject, and of your effort, in behalf of other victims.” In a tone and with a pathos I can never forget, he answered — “He saved others, himself he could not save.”

Ludlow left for Europe in June 1870 in an attempt to recover, both from his addictions and from tuberculosis. He travelled from New York with his sister Helen, who had been a constant source of support, and his wife and one of her sons. They stayed for a month and a half in London, then left for Geneva, Switzerland when his health again took a downturn.

He died the morning after his thirty-fourth birthday, and, perhaps as he meant to predict in this passage in What Shall They Do to Be Saved?: “Over the opium-eater’s coffin at least, thank God! a wife and a sister can stop weeping and say, ‘He’s free.’”