DANVERS - In the early 1890s, Danvers physician Fred J. Parkhurst opened the Willow Bark Institute, staking his personal and professional reputation on a peculiar method to cure drunkenness.

Parkhurst's treatment consisted of having patients ingest a bitter liquid before they downed a shot of whiskey. The main ingredient in the cure was salicin, a chemical found in the bark of the willow tree that's similar to aspirin. Obviously, Parkhurst hoped that after the typical three-week treatment his patients would associate their reflexive nausea with demon whiskey.

After this "temperance sanatorium" opened, a flurry of testimonials from Willow Bark patients appeared in the Pantagraph.

Danvers carriage maker Henry Musselman "had been one of the most ardent worshippers at the shrine of Bacchus," drinking as much as a quart of whiskey a day. "I had been on a big drunk, and stopped at the institute and told them to cure me," he recalled. "They have done so."

There were similar treatment programs, the most famous being the Keeley Cure. Based in Dwight, Dr. Leslie E. Keeley's gold chloride treatment was well known throughout the nation.

In December 1897, J.E. Jennings, a former patient who became the institute's manager, extolled the virtues of the Willow Bark cure.

"No, I am not proud that I had to take a treatment but I am proud that I did," he acknowledged in somewhat cryptic fashion.

Jennings did not conceal the fact that some men who were ostensibly cured fell off the wagon. Yet he maintained these periodic failures were not an indictment of the Willow Bark method, but rather an acknowledgement of old-fashioned human frailty.

According to Jennings, "cured" men turned to drink chiefly due to the influences of "bad women, gambling and evil associations."

In May 1903, Parkhurst opened the Concord Hotel in Danvers to serve as a boarding house for his patients. The Concord featured more than 40 rooms, public and private dinning areas and a well-appointed lobby that opened onto a spacious porch running alongside two sides of the hotel.

Parkhurst passed away in 1915, though his institute remained open for several more years. In 1935, Ernest W. Mammen, a longtime Bloomington surgeon, resurrected the Willow Bark name and reopened the clinic at the old Parkhurst home in Danvers. Dr. Mammen closed this second incarnation of the institute in 1950.

Whether Parkhurst's treatment offered long-term relief for problem drinkers, or instead represented a socially acceptable form of patent quackery, remains open to debate. Still, one must grudgingly admire the infomercial earnestness of those who praised the Willow Bark cure.

In the summer of 1892, O.W. Craig of Normal, who had just completed three weeks of apparently successful treatment, spoke before the Willow Bark Club. Craig said his addiction had left him a broken man. "Blasted hopes, wasted years and a fire-red nose was about all that was left me," he said.

Yet in the end, Craig found salvation in Parkhurst's cure. "Do not keep silent," he told his fellow graduates, "but cry aloud from the housetops, as it were; let your voice be heard from Maine to California, from the north to the south, through valley and over hill, until the very gates of heaven shall resound with your praises of the Willow Bark Institute and its wonderful cure."