THE GOLD CURE(?)

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume IX, Issue 447, 16 February 1899, Page 18

THE GOLD CURE(?)

We see by an exchange that the bi-chloride of gold treatment has established another stand, this time in Joliment, Melbourne, and promises to do all sorts of things that it never has and never will do. It has failed to fulfil its promises at any time or place up to now, and has practically done more injury than good to its patients in almost every instanee. There is not a particle of gold in the specific, which really consists principally of a combination of atropine and strychnia. The only thing new in their remedy is that it substitutes one poison for another, for strychnia in small doses was used as an antidote to alcoholic poisoning by a physician in Russia nearly two hundred years ago. We claim, and with good evidence to go upon, that the so-called remedy is much worse than the disease, for the following reason :—A distaste for alcohol is certainly engendered by its use, but the patient acquires another habit more exacting and more terrible even than alcoholism, and when he leaves the institute cured (?) finds that he is being tortured with a wretched craving that he does not know how to alleviate ; he suffers for a longer or shorter time according to the strength of his will, and in nine cases out of ten then either seeks relief in drugs or goes back to drink again. If the latter, he has a bad time of it for awhile, as the traces of atropine and strychnia still in his system battle with the alcohol, and give the poor wretch who has been treated a fearful experience for awhile, with the final result that he becomes a worse drunkard than ever. Whether it be called the Kieley, the White Plains, the Hagey, or the Bi-chloride of Gold Cure, the treatment is practically the same and the result equally disastrous. Our authority for the statements above is that about nine or ten years ago Mr Wilbur, F. Jackson and Dr Graeme Hammond, of New York, investigated the matter thoroughly, the former experimenting upon himself. Though a total abstainer, he took a course of the medicine, with a view of diagonising the effect on the'system in the interests of medical science. He suffered greatly from his experiment, but was enabled to expose the whole thing before the American Pathologicai Society. He was assisted in his work by Dr Graeme Hammond.