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

Abstract

Dr Leslie E. Keeley was perhaps the world's most famous addiction cure doctor at the turn of the 20th century, but mainstream medicine dismissed him as a quack because he dispensed a secret cure. This paper aims to describe Keeley's now largely forgotten story and to draw attention to the role of contextual issues in the acceptance or rejection of any theory of addiction, particularly the neuroscientific theories of the early 21st century. This study is a qualitative assessment and contextualization of historical documents. Its main sources are archival and are, for the most part, unknown to historians. The paper also offers intellectual and historical context that is drawn from leading historical and sociological analyses. Keeley's addiction cure was dismissed as quackery because it failed to meet the changing standards of late 19th-century professional medicine. This begs us to consider contextual issues in any assertion of the viability of addiction therapeutics, in the present as well the past. 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.