You wrote:
 
>In early Alaska, poet Robert Service (author of Cremation of Sam McGee
>and others) wrote a poem about using gold as a treatment for
>dipsomaniacs.  Has anyone any information about treatment programs
that
>actually used gold to treat alcoholism?
 
Leslie Keeley's famous "Keeley Institute" offered a "Gold Cure" (see
pp. 122-124 in Lender and Martin's _Drinking In America: A History_
(1982).  According to L&M's account:
 
"Keeley's secret was 'Bicholoride' or 'Double Chloride of Gold' (whence
the term 'Gold Cure').  Pharmacology recognized no such substance, and
Keeley never revealed his formula, but bichloride of gold was evidently
a gold salt mixed with various vegetable compounds.  Nor was Keeley's
gold cure unique.  Dr. J.L. Gray of Chicago, for example,  was one of
several other practitioners to offer a similar cure for alcoholism
during the 1880s, although he freely publicized his formula:  'Twelve
grains "chloride of gold sodium," six grams "muriate of ammonia,"
[etc.]...."Dr. Haines' Gold Specific" was another such cure.
Distributed through the mails by the Golden Specific Company, theis
concoction sold well at the turn of the century.  The directions for
use of this vegatable compound urged wives to put it secretly into
their husbands' food; presumably, miraculous results would follow"
(Lender and Martin, pp. 122-123).
 
L&M say that the Keeley Institute's popularity was so great that by the
turn of the century every state had one "(and some had as many as
three)" (p. 122).  In short, this was famous stuff.  A number of Keeley
Institutes lasted into the 1920s.
 
See also p. 155 and associated references in Jim Baumohl and Robin
Room's "Inebriety, Doctors, and the State: Alcoholism Treatment
Institutions Before 1940," pp. 135-174 in Marc Galanter (ed.) _Recent
Developments in Alcoholism_, vol. 7, New York & London: Plenum, 1987.
 
Ron Roizen in Berkeley