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

Abstract

proprietor of the "Gold Cure" for alcohol and drug habits, was the world's best-known addiction cure doctor at the end of the nineteenth century. Born in 1832, Keeley was an Illinois-licensed, American M.D. who received his degree from Chicago's Rush medical college in 1864 and immediately served as an army surgeon in the US Civil War. During the war he observed the drunkenness of the soldiers and decided that the drink habit was a curable disease. After the war he took a position as surgeon for the Chicago and Alton Railroad, which brought him to the small village of Dwight, Illinois, 80 miles south of Chicago, where he rode a 400-mile circuit on horseback and began to experiment with cures for habitual drunkenness.After a long series of unsuccessful attempts, he and a pharmacist partner John H. Oughton, believed that they had found a cure. In 1879 they began to dispense it from their clinic in Dwight where they were joined by a third partner, Curtis J. Judd, who was Keeley's brother-in-law and served as their business manager. The three of them incorporated the Leslie E. Keeley Company in 1886. 2The company identified gold chloride as the active agent of the cure, but because of its side effects, Keeley and Oughton suspended operations in 1885. They reformulated the medication and in 1887 they re-launched the therapy as the 'bichloride of gold cure.' Word of the cure's apparent success spread quickly. Patients poured in and the facilities at Dwight were overwhelmed. In order to cope with the numbers and also to reduce travel costs for patients, the Keeley Company began selling franchises in 1890, establishing the first branch clinic in Des Moines, Iowa. The franchises stipulated that an investor held the clear and exclusive right to operate a Keeley Institute provided that they used Dwight-trained physicians to administer the cure. The home company rarely charged royalties, but it insisted that the medications had to be bought from Dwight. The franchise holder was responsible for running the operation and paying for the clinic's expenses, including the salaries of the Dwight physicians. What the clinic earned beyond these expenses was profit.On that basis, Keeley Institutes opened across the United States and Canada. In 1892 the Chicago Tribune and its powerful editor, Joseph Medill, backed the Keeley Company's claim to have found a cure for the alcohol and drug habits, which boosted its popularity still further. The Tribune continued to back Keeley throughout the 1890s and soon the Keeley Company "belted the world," selling franchises and opening clinics from Dwight to London to Copenhagen, Sydney and Los Angeles. By June 1893, there were 118 Keeley institutes worldwide.Most importantly, tens of thousands of patients believed that the Gold Cure worked. As many as 30,000 of them joined one of 370 US chapters of the "Keeley League" after completing the four-to-five-week residential cure. 1 The League spread the word of successful cures via its Banner of Gold journal and its members wore