The physical effects of drugs, alcohol, sex and ageing

For my idea of creating my Dorian Gray interpretation as he is seen at the end of the novel, I have researched to find out what he would most likely have looked like at this time. After roughly twenty years of scandalous behaviour, including sex, drinking, taking opium, most likely getting into fights, and also just general ageing, one's appearance would be drastically altered. 

Ageing: 

• 'Skin exposed to ultraviolet rays over time assumes a leathery, wrinkled appearance, is fragile, and has impaired healing qualities. Smoking has been linked to increased wrinkling of the skin, greyish skin coloring, and a lessened ability of the skin to protect itself from ultraviolet rays.' (Saxon, Etten & Perkins, 2009, pg. 25)
• 'Some of the most visible signs of aging are graying of the hair, hair loss, and baldness. Graying and thinning of the hair begins around age 40 and is caused by sex-linked, genetic, and racial factors. Baldness, mostly a concern for men, usually begins with a receding hairline, but women also develop thinner, finer hair with raging. Men often have increased growth on the chin and around the lips.' (Saxon, Etten & Perkins, 2009, pg. 28)
• 'Nails grow more slowly with age, often becoming lacklustre, hard, thick, brittle, and having a gray or yellowish appearance. Longitudinal ridges and stations may cause the nails to split… Misshapen, untrimmed, thick nails may cause skin irritation and breakdown if they invade the surrounding skin areas.' (Saxon, Etten & Perkins, 2009, pg. 28-29)

Opium: 

• 'A reddish-brown heavy-scented addictive drug prepared from the juice of the opium poppy, used illicitly as a narcotic and occasionally in medicine as an analgesic.' (Oxford Dictionary, 2016)
• "Opium based medicines provoked chemical reactions in the brain, that allowed the user to explore the darkest recesses of the mind." (Andrew Graham-Dixon, 2014)
• "[Thomas De Quincey] used the drug as a way of fuelling his own escapist fantasies..." (Andrew Graham-Dixon, 2014)
• "[People used opium] to turn their own minds into gothic fantasy-producing machines" (Andrew Graham-Dixon, 2014)
• "Escaping your unhappiness by turning to drugs" (Andrew Graham-Dixon, 2014)
• In the 1920s, opium dens were very popular. Despite the Chinese smoking opium for centuries in a more ritualised way, when the popularity of the addictive drug came to England, users would just 'flop out - relaxed, not crazy, not hay-wire'. The fashionability of opium dens, however, was short-lived. People were arrested, and dens closed down. (Hooked: Drugs, 1998)
• 'For this, and all other changes in my dreams, were accompanied by deep-seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy... I seemed every night to descend, not metaphorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I could ever reascend. Nor did I, by waking, feel that I had reascended.' (De Quincey, 1821, pg. 158)
• 'The sense of space, and in the end, the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, etc. were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience.' (De Quincey, 1821, pg. 159)

Alcohol:

Anaemia



Jaundice



• 'If you saturate a piece of rag in alcohol and apply it to the arm, preventing evaporation... in short time the part becomes hot, painful and inflamed, so that you are compelled to remove the rag. This proves that alcohol is an irritant and has the power of inflaming.' (Dudley, 1923, pg 41)
• 'Its effects upon a man are different from those of any other poison, for it not only produces disease and death... but it changes the whole moral nature of man, and destroys all that civilization, education, and Christian instruction have done for his moral elevation and improvement. Its action upon the brain and nervous system appears to paralyse the will, lull the conscience to repose, and stupefy the moral perceptions, and at the same time it arouses and lets loose all the savage and criminal proclivities of man, and the most atrocious, revolting, and unnatural crimes are the common result.' (Dudley, 1923, pg 10)
• 'In the brains of men who died drunk, it has been found in as pure state as when taken into the stomach, it has been distilled from the urine, tissues, brain, spinal chord, nerves, etc., all tending to prove that most of it undergoes no change while it remains in the system, and does not give any permanent nourishment, or create any strength.' (Dudley, 1923, pg 18)
• 'Gastrointestinal effects include malnutrition and gastritis, which may lead to serious anemia.' (Saxon, Etten & Perkins, 2009, pg. 284)
• Liver failure: Cirrhosis - tending to bleed - e.g. nosebleeds (NHS, 2015)
• 
  Jaundice from alcohol-related liver disease (NHS, 2015)
  
  

Sex:

• Primary syphilis:
  'The appearance of a small, painless sore or ulcer called a chancre. The sores can appear in the mouth or on the lips.' (NHS, 12014)
• Secondary syphilis:
  'weight loss, patchy hair loss, skin rashes' (NHS, 2014)

Direct descriptive quote from the novel:

'Hour by hour, and week by week, the thing upon the canvas was growing old. It might escape the hideousness of sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it. The cheeks would become hollow or flaccid. Yellow crow's feet would creep round the fading eyes and make them horrible. The hair would lose its brightness, the mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross, as the mouths of old men are. There would be the wrinkled throat, the cold, blue-veined hands, the twisted body, that he remembered in the grandfather who had been so stern to him in his boyhood.' (Wilde, 1890, chpt. 10, pg. 118)

References:

- Hooked: Drugs: Channel 4, 29/10/98.

- Physical Change and Aging: A Guide for the Helping Professions, Fifth Edition, Sue V. Saxon, Mary Jean Etten, Dr. Elizabeth A. Perkins

- Alcohol: Its Combinations, Adulterations and Physical Effects, James G. Dudley
- Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey

- http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/opium 

- http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Cirrhosis/Pages/Symptoms.aspx

- http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Jaundice/Pages/Introduction.aspx

- http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Syphilis/Pages/Introduction.aspx