Scams Old and New

My village of Dwight was world famous once upon a time because of the Keeley Institute and the Keeley Cure.  Started by a former Union surgeon, Dr. Leslie E. Keeley, after the Civil War in 1879, the Keeley Institute became the first of the major drying out centers.  Get wealthy addicts away from their known settings for a month, give them a good diet, fresh country air and lots of exercise.  So far and so good, and it worked for most alcoholics and drug addicts who came to take the Cure, many of them quite famous in their time.

However, the Institute also produced a patent medicine called the Keeley Gold Cure, which was sold by mail order.  Like most patent medicines of the Nineteenth Century, other than a placebo effect, it accomplished nothing.  The selling hook was that the medicine contained gold.  Around 1900 there were Federal lawsuits filed alleging that there was no actual gold in the Keeley Gold Cure, which there was not.  Officials of the Institute refused under oath to say whether there was gold in the Keeley Gold Cure, and the litigation ultimately petered out.  The Institute remained in existence, hitting a high point in the twenties of the last century.  Then it entered a graceful decline, a victim of too many competitors post World War I, copying the part of the Institute’s methods that did work.  The old Keeley Building, a striking structure, sits across the street from my law mines.

Pfizer has been wiser than the Keeley Institute.  Instead of claiming its product contains real gold, it has gotten the Government and the Public to pay through the nose for the, perhaps,  fool’s gold it is pedaling.