Patients who were reluctant or refused to take their “medicine”  were allowed and even encouraged to consume alcohol to the full extent that they wished but they were secretly given drugs that caused extreme vomiting,  to create in them an aversion to alcohol.  In modern times disulfiram, also called Antabuse, is used in this manner, although patients are fully aware of the effects of consuming alcohol when they take it.

Many of Keeley’s patients relapsed;  the 118 treatment institutions dropped down to 50 facilities by 1900, and they were eventually shut down altogether.

Aversive Treatments 
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some physicians used shock therapy to treat patients with alcoholism. The Swedish Treatment was one aversive method used in the 1890s.

It comprised giving the patient massive quantities of alcohol to induce an aversion. Said author William White, “All meals and all snacks, regardless of fare, were saturated with whiskey. Patients wore whiskey-sprayed clothes and slept in whiskey-saturated sheets.  The goal was to satiate and sicken the appetite for alcohol and leave one begging for pure water.” There is no record of whether this treatment worked on anyone, although it likely did work on at least a few people.

Unusual and Bizarre Treatments 
According to author Mark Keller,  some physicians in the 1940s and 1950s viewed alcoholism as an endocrine disorder and used treatments of adrenal steroids and adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH).

Other physicians used injections of alcohol to treat alcoholism as well as injections of antihistamines or oxygen as well as treatment with carbon dioxide inhalation and neurosurgery.

Sometimes the drugs that were used to “cure” the alcoholism were themselves very harmful substances, such as cocaine and marijuana. Others who treated alcoholism thought that all the alcoholic really needed was a healthy diet.  Some of them concluded that red meat induced a craving for alcohol,  and therefore it must be eliminated entirely from the diet to rid the person of the craving.

Inebriate Hospitals and Insane Asylums 
One method of treating alcoholics was to put them in asylums for up to a year or longer,  where they could not gain any access to alcohol. These facilities were called inebriate hospitals. In other cases, alcoholics were placed in insane asylums with psychotic individuals and other alcoholics.  Said Mark Keller in his chapter in Alcohol Interventions, “Like all treatments,  apparently the long institutional confinement also produced its fair share of remissions. Some alcoholics emerged as confirmed abstainers.”