Monroe County history: Keely Institute was treatment center for addicts

Back in the late 1890's and early 1900's, Monroe was home to one of the over 200 branches of the Keeley Institute, an early alcohol and opium treatment center that offered a commercial medical treatment from 1879 to 1965.

It was the brainchild of Dr. Leslie Keeley, whose Keeley Cure – or Gold Cure as it was also known -- was wildly popular in the late 1890's but was highly criticized by the mainstream medical community for its use of questionable practices – particularly in the development of the Keeley Cure oral liquid – available either via mail order for use by addicts in the privacy of their homes or at a Keeley Institute center.

Operations headquarters for the Keeley Institute were based in Dwight, Illinois. In the 1880's, Keeley set up shop in a small wooded office where a dedicated group of students would meet, receiving both the tonic and strict guidelines for behavior. According to the article, “Inside a Nineteenth-Century Quest to End Addiction”, replaced by an impressive stone edifice engraved with the words “The Leslie E. Keeley Co.” In addition, he opened the Livingston Hotel next door, with 56 guest rooms for patients.

Dr. Keeley now attended to some 600 people a month. He boasted of 60,000 “graduates” of his cure. Across the street from the hotel, the railroad constructed a new station with cathedral ceilings and oak wainscoting. When the train from Chicago pulled in each day, dozens of patients welcomed the newest arrivals. There were stretchers at the ready for those who were too drunk to walk.

Current students and Keeley Institute graduates often met after meetings throughout the week to talk and partake in non-alcoholic rituals such as a “buttermilk break”. It is this formation of a support group that may also been the inspiration for another successful alcohol treatment that was founded in the 1930's in Akron, Ohio – Alcoholics Anonymous.

Monroe’s branch of the Keeley Institute was known as the Gold Cure and Park House. It offered accommodations for mostly male clientele who followed Keeley’s treatment – a collaboration with John Oughton, an Irish chemist and a Fargo, N.D-based merchant by the name of Curtis Judge who marketed the Gold Cure under the slogan, “Drunkenness is a disease, and I can cure it.”

The ingredients of the Gold Cure were a closely guarded secret: Bichloride of gold contained traces of strychnine, apomorphine, willow bark, ginger, ammonia, belladonna, atropine, hyoscine, scopolamine, quinine, coca, opium, morphine, and small amounts of alcohol were identified as possible components. Keeley vigorously denied the use of atropine, which was known to cause nausea if taken while drinking, as well as the addition of actual alcohol that served as a preservative. The treatments were given four times daily for four weeks.

When Keeley died in 1900, he had established an alcohol treatment mecca in the U.S. that improved conditions in Dwight – dirt roads were paved, electric lighting replaced gas lamps, new homes with modern plumbing and other amenities were built. Dwight became the “most famous village” as a result of Keeley’s efforts. Later opium treatments were less successful.

Keeley’s belief that alcoholism was a disease and not a social vice contributed to a significant shift in attitudes toward drunkenness in the 1890's and beyond. Though it was an unintended side effect of his “gold cure,” the support community that developed at Dwight and affiliates like Monroe may have been Keeley’s most valuable contribution to the understanding of alcoholism. It established many of the privately-funded as well as publicly funding alcohol/addiction treatment institutional structures and social support that became the” gold standard” for treatment today.

Tom Adamich is President – Visiting Librarian Service, a firm he has operated since 1993. He also is Project Archivist for the Greening Nursery Company and Family Archives.

This article originally appeared on The Monroe News: Monroe County history: Keely Institute was treatment center for addicts