I’m grateful for our brand new AA meeting and for everyone who got to attend. I’m grateful for a Program that brings people together to recover. I’m grateful the path was always there and grateful I was finally able to see it. I’m grateful for yoga this morning. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I am going to declare the inaugural “Anyone Anywhere” Meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous an unqualified success. Yes, our speaker had a last-minute emergency and we did have a couple of Zoom-Bombers—the guy who was doing back-flips in his room was kind of impressive in a weird way. Welcome to AA! Of course, if you weren’t able to join us last night, lament not, because we’ll be back on the Zoom next Tuesday night at 7:00pm and we’ll be covering the first half of “Bill’s Story”—so you definitely won’t want to miss that!
Last night, we read and discussed the “Doctor’s Opinion” (pages xxv-xxxii of the Big Book) and every time I read it I marvel at how revelatory it is. I’ve written about Dr. William Duncan Silkworth before and for some reason his part of the AA story really strikes a chord with me.
Terms of Endearment: Dr. Silkworth and AA
(there’s even a voiceover of it)
Dr. Silkworth ran Towns Hospital—the before-its time treatment center that was on Central Park West here in New York City in the 1930’s. It was revolutionary in it’s treatment of alcoholics—hydrotherapy, Bella Donna treatments, it was the swanky rehab of its time. It’s where Bill W. finally got sober—-on his third “visit.” He arrived at Towns with the remnant of the four beers he bought when he set off from Brooklyn (leaving behind the bottle of gin in the toilet tank in the basement) and checked himself in. He was in his room at the hospital when he had his spiritual awakening:
My depression deepened unbearably and finally it seemed to me as though I were at the bottom of the pit. I still gagged badly on the notion of a Power greater than myself, but finally, just for the moment, the last vestige of my proud obstinacy was crushed. All at once I found myself crying out, “If there is a God, let Him show Himself! I am ready to do anything, anything!”
Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me, in the mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness. All about me and through me there was a wonderful feeling of Presence, and I thought to myself, “So this is the God of the preachers!” A great peace stole over me and I thought, “No matter how wrong things seem to be, they are still all right. Things are all right with God and His world.”
(Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age: A Brief History,” p. 64)
It was Dr. Silkworth who reassured Bill that he wasn’t having a withdrawal-induced hallucination:
At length I became truly frightened. I thought I was hallucinating. So I called Dr. Silkworth, told him the story as best I could, and said to him, “Doctor, am I hallucinating? Have I gone crazy?” He questioned me, and at length he said, “No Bill,” he said, “You are not crazy. Some great psychic event has occurred. I can feel it, I can see it, but I can’t define it. Whatever it is, it’s much better than what had you only an hour ago. And you better hold on to what you have.”
Dr. Silkworth was a big-deal doctor in the 1930’s, and his “opinion” not only perfectly lays out the foundation for the Program of Alcoholics Anonymous, but was one of the first acknowledgements that alcoholism was a disease, albeit one the medical community had (and still has!) difficulties understanding and treating people suffering from this disease. He gets right to the point:
Much has been written pro and con, but among physicians, the general opinion seems to be that most chronic alcoholics are doomed.
Big Book, p. xxx
Dr. Silkworth carefully constructs the case: Most of the alcoholics he encountered were hopeless and untreatable in the view of the medical establishment; he discovered common symptoms among the alcoholics he treated; though aware of the disastrous consequences of their drinking, alcoholics were unable to stop; The psychic changes in patients following the AA program was real and somehow worked to resolve their obsessive thinking around drinking. Dr. Silkworth saw miracles occurring as those formerly hopeless alcoholics began practicing the principles of what would become AA.
We feel, after many years of experience, that we have found nothing which has contributed more to the rehabilitation of these [people] than the altruistic movement now growing up among them.
Big Book, p. xxviii
Bill estimated that Dr. Silkworth “Twelve-Stepped” more than 40,000 alcoholics in his lifetime. That is a staggering testament to the work of a non-alcoholic among us. Bill wrote a pretty moving tribute to Dr. Silkworth when he died:
Thousands [of these alcoholics] he patiently treated long before AA when the chance for recovery was slim. But he always had faith that one day a way out would be found. He never tired of drunks and their problems. A frail man, he never complained of fatigue. He never sought distinction; his work was his reward. In his last years he ignored a heart condition and he died on the job—right among us drunks, and with his boots on.
Grapevine, August 1957
Think about it. Dr. Silkworth was one of the leading addiction and recovery physicians of the time and the most extraordinary part of the story is this:
Dr. Silkworth’s medical training was probably not the thing that let him recognize that a hopeless, crazy drunk might have figured out the way to treat alcoholics—while drinking of course. I’m guessing that was Dr. Silkworth’s heart at work. He risked his career and his reputation for a drunk who may have been wearing a bathrobe when he made his pitch to be allowed to start treating alcoholics at Towns Hospital. I mean, letting the patients come up with their own treatments is the kind of thing that gets doctors fired.
I thought this was the most moving part of Bill W’s tribute to Dr. Silkworth:
As we looked back over those early scenes in New York, we saw often in the midst of them, the benign little doctor who loved drunks. William Duncan Silkworth, then physician-in-chief of the Charles B. Towns Hospital in New York, and the man who we now realize was very much the founder of AA.
Grapevine, August 1957
A benign little doctor who loved drunks literally helped save millions of us. He did it by listening to us and living among us. He died among us, as Bill put it, “with his boots on.” That is a truly beautiful story. Thank you, Dr. Silkworth.