“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)
