Dr. Keeley’s “Gold Cure”

By Jack Klasey

July 5, 2025

“Drunkenness is a disease, and I can cure it,” was the motto of the man who made the small Livingston County village of Dwight an internationally famous location in the late 1800s.

Dr. Leslie Enraught Keeley settled in Dwight in 1866, at the age of 30, following service as a Union Army surgeon in the Civil War. He had “realized the danger of alcoholism in his medical work during the war,” and continued that interest after opening his private medical practice in the Dwight, located some 30 miles west of Kankakee.

In 1879, Keeley announced what he termed a “major discovery,” a new treatment for alcoholism that involved injections of a “double chloride of gold” solution. The “Gold Cure” had been developed by Keeley and an Irish chemist, John R. Oughton. The two men were joined by a local businessman, Curtis Judd, to form an alcoholism treatment center that would become famous as The Keeley Institute.

Although he was denounced as a “quack” or “snake oil promoter” by the medical profession, Leslie Keeley was one of the first to treat alcoholism as a physical disease, rather than a moral failing. He widely advertised his Keeley Institute at Dwight in Midwestern newspapers, and attracted large numbers of alcoholics seeking a cure. An advertisement from 1939, the Institute’s sixtieth year, claimed to have treated “400,000 men and women from all walks of life.”

At the height of its popularity in the late 1800s and early 1900s, “The Keeley” was responsible for eight hundred passengers per week arriving at Dwight’s Chicago and Alton Railroad depot. (the Dwight station, now on the National Register of Historic Places, was designed in 1891 by famed architect Henry Ives Cobb). Keeley soon began franchising his treatment method; the “Gold Cure” was eventually being prescribed in more than 200 facilities across the United States and Europe.

What was the “Gold Cure?”

In a June 10, 2016, post on the University of Illinois Press blog, author R.K. Cunningham wrote that Keeley “kept the formula for his cure a secret. Conjured with the help of a Dwight pharmacist, the magic elixir supposedly came from Keeley’s study of old texts, with the Renaissance physician Paracelsus an important source. Keeley, whatever his deceits, made it clear the cure contained twenty percent alcohol….Chemical tests by skeptics and rivals turned up other ingredients like ginger, willow bark, a tincture of chinchona…and hops—along with coca, a sulfate of strychnine, and apomorphine. No one could find gold in there, however. Historians have suggested Keeley enlisted the metal for marketing rather than medicinal purposes. Other believe that, if Keeley did initially use gold, he soon removed it from the formula due to adverse side effects or cost.”

Keeley’s treatment method was described in a TIME magazine article on the Institute’s sixtieth anniversary in September, 1939: “Unvarying is the traditional Keeley routine. An incoming inebriate pays $160, plus room board, must stay for 31 days. His whiskey ration is gradually tapered off: eight ounces the first day, six ounces the second, four ounces the third, none from then on. Four times a day, he gets gold chloride injections; every two hours, he takes a tonic. At the end of the course, Keeley Drs. Robert Estill Maupin, Bert Tripeer, and Andrew Jackson McGee look him over, ask him if he still feels the ‘irresistible craving of the nerve cells for alcohol.’ Usually, he says no. How many of the 400,000 Keeley graduates have stayed cured, Director Oughton does not know, for he has no means of checking up. Although most physicians now believe that drunkards are neurotics and cannot be cured by injections, Keeley stoutly boasts that it has cured 17,000 drunken doctors since it first opened its doors.”

An encyclopedia entry for the Keeley Institute notes that the Dwight facility “maintained  a philosophy of open, homelike care throughout its history…Patients at Dwight were free to stroll the grounds of the institute as well as the streets of the village….Initially, patients were boarded in nearby hotels, such as the Dwight Livingston Hotel, or the homes of private residents. Later patients stayed in the converted John R. Oughton House.”

The Livingston Hotel, on the southwest corner of W. Main Street and E. Mazon Avenue (Illinois 17), once housed hundreds of Keeley patients. Today, it is a facility of the State of Illinois, the William Fox Developmental Center, a residential facility for adults with severe and profound intellectual disabilities. In 1919, the hotel had been leased from the Keeley Institute, and converted to a hospital for the treatment of WWI veterans. It remained a veterans’ facility until 1965, when it was purchased by the State of Illinois and converted to the Fox Developmental Center.

The Keeley Institute continued to operate until 1966, when it closed after 87 years of treating alcoholics. In addition to the former Livingston Hotel, several other structures associated with the Institute still exist. The Keeley Building, at Prairie Avenue and South Street, opened in 1920, providing offices for the Institute. Today, it houses a number of commercial offices.

Across Prairie Avenue from the Keeley Building is the John R. Oughton House, the centerpiece of the former institute campus. A local landmark is a tall, restored decorative windmill; the former carriage house is the Dwight Public Library. The large, Victorian Oughton House became, for a number of years,  a popular restaurant called the Country Mansion.

At the east edge of the campus is a large bronze plaque on a granite pedestal, unveiled at the 1939 anniversary celebration. The Kankakee Republican-News reported, on September 19,  “Nearly 10,000 people attended the 60th anniversary program of the Keeley Institute here Sunday….A bronze plaque in honor of the three [founders] was unveiled and dedicated by Franklin L. Smith, who was acquainted with the founders.”

“Lesley E. Keeley, John R. Oughton, Curtis Judd,” read the plaque, “To commemorate their lasting services to mankind, this tablet, presented by the citizens of Dwight, was erected September 17, 1939, the 60^th anniversary of the founding of the Keeley Institute.”

Jack Klasey is a former Journal reporter and a retired publishing executive. He can be contacted at jwklasey@comcast.net.