Silkworth

“Take my own doctor, William D. Silkworth. In our forthcoming history book, AA Comes of Age, I have drawn a word portrait of him which runs in part as follows:

"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 a founder of AA. From him we learned the nature of our illness. And he supplied us with the tools with which to puncture the toughest alcoholic ego, those shattering phrases by which he described our illness: the obsession of the mind that compels us to drink and the allergy of the body that condemns us to go mad or die. Without these indispensable passwords, AA could never have worked. Dr. Silkworth taught us how to till the black soil of hopelessness, out of which every single spiritual awakening in our fellowship has since flowered. In December 1934 this man of science had sat humbly by my bed following my own sudden and overwhelming spiritual experience, reassuring me: 'No, Bill,' he had said, 'you are not hallucinating. Whatever you have got, you had better hang on to; it is so much better than what you had only an hour ago.' These were great words for the AA to come! Who else could have said them?

"When I wanted to go to work with alcoholics, he led me to them right there in his hospital, risking his professional reputation.

"After six months of failure on my part to dry up any drunks, Dr. Silkworth again reminded me of Professor William James' observation that truly transforming spiritual experiences are nearly always founded on calamity and collapse. 'Stop preaching at them,' Dr. Silkworth had said, 'and give them the hard medical facts first. This may soften them up at depth so that they will be willing to do anything to get well. Then they may accept those moral psychology ideas of yours, and even a Higher Power.'

Bill W. (Extract, The Physicians, AA Grapevine August 1957, The Language of the Heart p 175)

"Perhaps no physician will ever give so much devoted attention to so many alcoholics as did Dr. Silkworth. It is estimated that in his lifetime he saw an amazing forty thousand of them. In the years before his death in 1951, in close cooperation with AA and our red-headed power-house nurse, Teddy, he had ministered to nearly 10,000 alcoholics at New York's Knickerbocker Hospital alone. None of those he treated will ever forget the experience, and the majority of them are sober today."

So Dr. Silkworth "twelfth-stepped" forty thousand alcoholics. Thousands of these 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. During most of his career he made only a bare living. 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.

Who of us in AA can match this record of Dr. Silkworth's? Who has his measure of fortitude, faith and dedication?

So when--twenty-three years after Dr. Silkworth had treated me for the last time--I saw and heard and felt the spirit that was abroad in that great AMA meeting, I thanked God for the doctors, one of the finest groups of friends that AA can ever have."

- Bill W. (Extract, The Physicians, AA Grapevine August 1957; The Language of the Heart p 176)

Cheers

The Fellas (Friends of Alcoholics Anonymous)