Keeping secrets: Leslie E. Keeley, the gold cure and the 19th‐century neuroscience of addiction

Abstract

Keeley's near erasure from the historical record was a consequence of a broader, late 19th-century medical power struggle that took precedence over the testimony of tens of thousands of satisfied patients who claimed that Keeley's cure worked. Context matters in the assessment of the viability of theories of addiction from the past, but also from the present. Historians and social scientists are well placed to make those assessments.

“We Belt the World”: Dr. Leslie E. Keeley’s “Gold Cure” and the Medicalization of Addiction in 1890s London

“…He felt that the compensation he received was a just reward and that secrecy was the only way to protect the cure's integrity and to defend his intellectual property. 4 Nonetheless, continued controversy, particularly generated by the franchised clinics, which were effectively beyond the control of the home institute in Dwight, along with growing evidence of relapse, caused the company's growth to slow by the mid-1890s. Keeley died in 1900 and the international franchises began to close around the turn of the twentieth century.…”