Drug addiction

Drug addiction is a condition and a recurring moral problem in the narrative: it begins in the relationship between a former army orderly and the Army Medical Captain, then reappears in the narrator’s account of long-term drug use and medical practice. The narrator presents addiction as an illness that demands sympathy, but also as a force that complicates consent, care, professional judgment, and responsibility. His explanations are detailed, yet they remain a self-interested affidavit: he admits wrongdoing while also explaining why he continued it.

Origins and the Army Medical Captain

The narrator traces the Army Medical Captain’s dependence to wartime treatment. Assigned as the Captain’s orderly during the war, he took over much of the work of examining and treating patients while the Captain concentrated on research into producing sugar from wood. Under the Captain’s guidance, the narrator learned to perform complicated operations. He later says that, in response to the Captain’s persistent pleading, he began administering drugs to him every day. By the end of the war, the Captain showed symptoms of addiction.

Their association continued after demobilization. They opened a clinic together, and the narrator assisted in both its management and its medical work. The Captain’s condition did not improve: he could still give instructions through medical charts, but was no longer personally able to examine or treat patients. The arrangement therefore joined a sick man’s dependence on drugs to the narrator’s growing practical role in the clinic, while leaving the Captain’s name and professional standing central to their shared enterprise.

Dependence, care, and control

The narrator insists that he continued supplying drugs out of friendship, not because the Captain coerced him or because of a difference in rank. He accepts responsibility for that decision, while describing treatment as exceptionally difficult and expressing the view that recovery from addiction was exceedingly unlikely. In his account, administering drugs amounted to a form of euthanasia extended over time; nevertheless, he says he lacked the courage to abandon the Captain. Care and harm are thus difficult to separate. The narrator understands the supply of drugs as a burden he chose to carry, even as he recognizes its damaging character.

The Captain’s dependence also affected their personal relationship. The narrator says the Captain feared that he would leave and used pressure on Nana to establish a relationship between her and the narrator as a way of keeping him close. Nana had been the Captain’s legal wife and managed the clinic’s accounts; she later became the narrator’s common-law partner. The narrator describes this history as entangled with the Captain’s illness, not simply as a private arrangement. He also recalls that the Captain used flattery and repeated suggestions of suicide to discourage him from giving up medical work. The narrator says he felt concern about the Captain’s demands for greater quantities of drugs and his requests involving Toyama Yoko, a newly hired apprentice nurse. These details show dependence reaching beyond drug-taking itself, shaping the clinic’s working relationships and the narrator’s decisions.

The clinic, professional identity, and the law

Addiction put the clinic under scrutiny. The narrator says the excessive quantity of drugs used prompted an investigation, while the Captain’s increasingly abnormal speech and conduct attracted public suspicion and abuse. In the eighth year of the narrator’s practice, they closed the clinic and moved to another city. Later, at Nana’s suggestion, the Captain stopped appearing in public, and the narrator registered himself under the Captain’s identity. According to the affidavit, the Captain agreed to this plan. The narrator nevertheless acknowledges that he was practicing illegally and that the Captain’s qualifications provided cover for his livelihood.

The narrator presents several motives for staying in medicine: the need to replenish the Captain’s drugs, a growing reputation among patients, and his own increasing interest in medical work. He emphasizes that his wartime experience, twelve years of practice, and continued study gave him confidence in his abilities, but also concedes that skill and patient trust did not make the practice lawful. He says that the Captain’s illness made treatment especially difficult, but does not claim this excused his conduct. The affidavit’s careful distinctions—between friendship and coercion, ability and authorization, and care and illegality—make addiction inseparable from the question of who is entitled to treat patients and under whose name.

Evidence, disclosure, and narrative significance

The Captain’s death brings the question of addiction into an investigation. The narrator identifies the recovered body as the Army Medical Captain’s and acknowledges that the Captain had previously shown a risk of suicide, while saying that he regretted failing to prevent it. He does not claim to know why the Captain left the hospital or died. Instead, he offers possibilities and stresses the limits of what he can establish. He also describes evidence of long-term drug use identified in the autopsy. The body therefore connects the Captain’s private dependence to the public inquiry into the hospital and the narrator’s unlawful practice.

The narrator’s own later account makes addiction a second, distinct strand rather than merely a condition attributed to the Captain. In a scene of drug administration, the narrator feigns sleep while another person gives him three cubic centimeters of morphine hydrochloride. Elsewhere, he refers to physical evidence of prolonged drug use and to the difficulty that such evidence could create for an attempted account of death by drowning. The text does not make these passages identical to the Captain’s history; instead, they extend the subject from the clinic’s compromised care into the narrator’s own exposed vulnerability.

At the close of the affidavit, the narrator says the Captain had long since ceased to need him and that he no longer had an obligation to continue practicing under false pretenses. He distinguishes the Captain’s view that there was no crime without a complainant from his own judgment that impersonating a doctor was criminal. Addiction helps explain how the clinic’s arrangement persisted, but the narrator’s eventual confession refuses to make illness a complete defense. The state is presented as both a private dependency and a public problem, leaving compassion in tension with the damage, deception, and legal responsibility surrounding its management.