Drunkards' Bane

STOP

WHISKEY

I'm the happiest little woman In all this little town; And my merry laugh and singing Takes the place of sigh and frown.

For JOHN HAS QUIT HIS DRINKING And is like himself once more, And the world is just a paradise With such happiness in store!

That headline, that poetry and the sketch of "John's Wife" with her mouth open heavenward in praise of a drunkard's nostrum or reaching for "John's" de-alcoholized kiss--last week commanded attention in many a U. S. newspaper which profits from quack-advertisements. Presumably, enough whiskey continues available in the U. S. to gamble that a good percentage of newspaper readers would "fall" for a cure. Such cure Dr. J. W. Haines, of Cincinnati, offered to provide in his powders. They contain milk sugar, starch, capsicum (pepper) and a minute amount of ipecac--a useless and fake dope against alcoholism, declares the American Medical Association.

But the purveyor of that nostrum has something more valuable, to himself, than its ingredients. He has a precious name. He calls it the "Golden Treatment," and thereby he trades quackishly on the fame of the late Dr. Leslie E. Keeley. Keeley Cures (a few still exist) loudly but dubiously used the double chloride of gold in "curing" drunkards.

Keeley had had a formal medical education at Rush Medical College (now University of Chicago Medical School) and practiced as an Army surgeon for a time. Later the Chicago & Alton R. R. employed him as official surgeon. That was in the period when the Women's Christian Temperance Union made Ten Nights in a Bar Room a gospel of propriety, when the late Carrie Nation and her harridans heaved hatchets through expensive back-bar mirrors and at good mahogany fixtures. On that temperance agitation Keeley rode. Dwight, Ill., became the "Mecca of Liberty," the "Drunkard's Divorce Court."

The theoretical but unsound basis of his cure was the double chloride of gold. He prated: "It acts like vaccination, eliminating from the system the element which has an affinity for the poison in alcohol. . . . Gold acts on the higher cerebral nerve centres, the seat of the diseased will and the mania for strong drink." Because his treatment had some practical success, simple folks fixed their memories on gold. Therefore the subtle plausibility of the Haines Golden Treatment.

The real benefit that Keeley gave his patients was rest, nourishing food and rigorous physical hygiene. He made the drunkard take a bath every third day and change his underwear every four or five days. They were "cured" in a month, so happily and so numerously that they formed a "Grand Army of American Drunkards."