The Little
Doctor Who Loved Drunks
A
drunk is lying on a bed in a hospital, and a
doctor is sitting beside the bed. The drunk is
talking earnestly to the doctor. “...a wave
of depression came over me,” the drunk is
saying. “I realized that I was powerless -
hopeless - that I couldn’t help myself, and
that nobody else could help me. I was in black
despair. And in the midst of this, I
remembered about this God business.. .and I
rose up in bed and said, “If there be a God,
let him show himself now!”
(A doctor specializing in
alcoholism hears all kinds of crazy stories
from drunks in all stages of de-fogging. You’d
expect him to have his tongue in his cheek at
this point.)
“All of a sudden, there
was a light,” the drunk goes on, “a
blinding white light that filled the whole
room. a tremendous wind seemed to be blowing
all around me and right through me. I felt as
if I were standing on a high mountain
top..."
(You’d think a doctor
would become hardened after listening to these
drunks rave day after day. It’s a
discouraging, thankless field... alcoholism.)
The drunk continued: “I
felt that I stood in the presence of God. I
felt an immense joy. And I was sure beyond all
doubt that I was free from my obsession with
alcohol. The only condition was that I share
the secret of this freedom with other
alcoholics and help them to recover.”
The drunk paused and turned
to the doctor. “Ever since it happened, I’ve
been lying here wondering whether or not I’ve
lost my mind. Tell me, doctor - am I insane -
or not?”
The drunk was Bill W.
Fortunately for Bill —
fortunately for A.A. — fortunately for the
thousands of us who have come after - the
doctor was Dr. Silkworth. By great good luck -
or by the grace of God (depending upon your
viewpoint) - the doctor was Dr. Silkworth.
It would have been so easy
to dismiss Bill’s experience as
hallucination, one of the many possible
vagaries of a rum-soaked brain. And a
disparaging word from the doctor right at this
point could have choked off the tender shoot
of faith and killed it. Alcoholics Anonymous
might have got started somewhere else,
somehow. Or it might not. Certainly it wouldn’t
have started here. Very possibly the life of
every one of us A.A.’s hung on the doctor’s
answer to the question, “Am I insane?”
It was there that Dr.
Silkworth made the first of his indispensable
contributions to A.A. He knew - by an insight
that no amount of medical training alone can
give a man - that what had happened to Bill
was real, and important. “I don’t know
what you’ve got,” he told Bill, “but
whatever it is, hang on to it. You are not
insane. And you may have the answer to your
problem.” The encouragement of the man of
science, as much as the spiritual experience
itself, started A.A. on its way.
When Dr. Silkworth died of
a heart attack in his home in New York early
in the morning of March 22nd, even those
A.A.'s who knew him best and loved him most
awoke to the realization that we had lost a
greater friend, a greater doctor, a greater
man than we had ever realized. It was
particularly hard to appreciate the greatness
of the man while Dr. Silkworth was yet with
us, because of his profound personal modesty
and the disarming gentleness, the unassuming
and almost invisible skill, with which he
accomplished his daily miracles of medical and
spiritual healing.
We know that he was a
prodigious and relentless worker, but still it
was a shock to discover that in his lifetime
of work with those who suffer our disease, he
had talked with 51,000 alcoholics - 45,000 at
Towns Hospital and 6,000 at Knickerbockers!
Yet he was never in a
hurry. And he had no “formulas,” no stock
answers. Somehow he found out very early that
the unexpected was to be expected in
alcoholism, and for a man who knew as many of
the answers as he did, he came to each new
case with a wonderfully open mind... the great
and classic example of which is his handling
of Bill.
And this gentle little
doctor with his white hair and his china blue
eyes - child’s eyes, saints eyes - was a man
of immense personal courage. It must be
remembered that he went much farther than
merely encouraging Bill’s faith in his
spiritual experience, he saw to it that Bill
was permitted to come back into Towns Hospital
to share his discovery with other alcoholics.
Today - when “carrying the message to others”
has become a very respectable part of an
undeniably effective program - it is easy to
forget that “carrying the message” in the
beginning was a highly unorthodox undertaking.
It had no precedent and no history of success;
most authorities would have turned thumbs down
on it as just plain screwball.
Again, we forget how our
technique has been mellowed and refined by the
wisdom of experience. We know that the
blinding light and the overwhelming rush of
God-consciousness are not necessary, that they
are indeed very rare phenomena and that the
great majority of recoveries among us are of
the much less spectacular gradual and
educational kind. But in the beginning, the
“hot flash” was stressed - nay, insisted
upon.
Dr. Silkworth had his
professional reputation to lose, and nothing
whatever to gain, by permitting and
encouraging this unheard-of procedure of one
God-bitten drunk trying to pass on his strange
story of a light and a vision to other
alcoholics - most of whom at that time
received it with lively hostility or
magnificent indifference.
Then Bill met Dr. Bob, and
the first few drunks, incredulously, began to
make their incredible recoveries. The infant
society, without a book, without a program
really, and without a reputation or standing
of any kind - began its growth. We forget how
halting and feeble that early growth was, how
bedeviled with obstacles in a world skeptical
of spiritual experience and often hostile to
it.
Dr. Silkworth from the
beginning threw all of his weight as a doctor,
a neurologist, a specialist in alcoholism,
into aiding the progress of this mongrel and
highly unpaired society in every possible
way. He committed social and professional
heresy right and left in order to publish and
implement his burning faith in a movement
which as yet only half-suspected its own
destiny and which had to grope rather blindly
to find terms for its own faith in itself.
When there was need for
money to publish the book Alcoholics
Anonymous, Dr. Silkworth used his personal
influence without stint to help raise the
money. As a preface to the book he wrote the
chapter titled, “The Doctors Opinion,”
giving A.A. his praise and approval without
reservation or qualification- at a time when
there were only a thin one hundred of us dried
up!
He was indeed our first
friend, and indeed a friend in need. His faith
in us was firmer than our faith in ourselves.
Bill says: “Without Silky’s help, we never
would have got going - or kept going!”
Again, his contribution was indispensable.
Why did he do it?
The answer to that is the
answer to Dr. Silkworth’s whole career: he
loved drunks. Why he loved drunks is a secret
known only to God and the doctor - and perhaps
the doctor himself did not wholly understand
the mystery. “It’s a gift,” he used to
say, his eyes twinkling.
He discovered his gift very
early in his medical practice. He was
graduated from Princeton in 1896, and took his
medical degree at New York University in 1900.
Then he interned at Bellevue; and it was while
working at Bellevue that he found he was drawn
to alcoholics, and they to him.
When nobody else could calm
a disturbed drunk, Dr. Silkworth could. And he
found, rather to his amazement, that even the
toughest and most case-hardened of drunks
would talk to him freely - and that many of
them, even more amazingly, wept. It became
evident that he exerted - or that there was
exerted through him - some kind of thawing
influence on the life-springs of the
alcoholic.
Yet the years that followed
were full of discouragement. There were two
years on the psychiatric staff at the U.S.
Army Hospital at Plattsburg, N.Y., during the
first world war, followed by several years on
the staff of the Neurological Institute of the
Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Twice he
entered into private practice, only to be
drawn back into hospital work with alcoholics.
His work continued on at Charles B. Towns
Hospital, New York, a private hospital
specializing in alcoholism and drug addiction.
Here, Dr. Silkworth’s special skill with
alcoholics - and his growing understanding and
love for them - had full scope. Yet he
estimated that the percentage of real
recoveries among the alcoholics he worked with
was only about 2 per cent. The large number of
hopeless cases, and the deep degrees of human
tragedy and suffering involved, weighed
heavily upon the gentle doctor. He was often
profoundly discouraged.
Then came Bill - and A.A.
One who has known the
doctor intimately over many years has said
this about it: “Silky never told me this. It’s
my own opinion. But I believe that A.A. was
Silky’s reward. All those years he plodded
along - treating drunks medically - defending
them - loving them - and not getting anywhere
much. And then God said: “All right, little
man, I’m going to give you and your drunks a
lift!” And when the lighting struck, there
was Silky, right where he belonged - in the
midst of it!”
Early in his career, at a
time when alcoholism was almost universally
regarded as a willful and deliberate
persistence in a nasty vice, Dr. Silkworth
came to believe in the essential goodness of
the alcoholic. “These people do not want to
do the things they do,” he insisted. “They
drink compulsively, against their will.” One
of the early drunks whom Dr. Silkworth
treated, a big husky six-footer, dropped on
his knees before the doctor, tears streaming
down his face, begging for a drink. “I said
to myself then and there,” Dr. Silkworth
related, - this is not just a vice or habit.
This is compulsion, this is pathological
craving, this is disease!”
He loved drunks - but there
was nothing in the least degree fatuous or
sentimental about that love. It could be an
astringent love, an almost surgical love.
There was the warmest of light in those blue
eyes, but still they could burn right through
to the bitter core of any lie, any sham. He
could see clean through egotism, bombast,
self-pity and similar miserable rags that we
drunks use so cleverly to hide our central
fear and shame.
All this he did - without
hurting anyone. While insisting rigorously
that recovery was possible only on a moral
basis - “You cannot go two ways on a one-way
street” - he never preached, never
denounced, never even really criticized. He
brought you, somehow, to make your own
judgments of yourself, the only kind of
judgments that count with an alcoholic. How
did he do it? “It’s a gift.” Just coming
into his presence was like walking into light.
He not only had vision - he gave vision.
There is not room here -
nor has there been opportunity for the
necessary research - to consider his status as
a medical man. It can be said that he held a
position of very high eminence in his
profession. He encountered opposition to some
of his views, and he was latterly the
recipient of very widespread recognition and
praise for his work. It is literally true that
he was the world’s greatest practical
authority on alcoholism. His pioneering work
in the concept of alcoholism as a
manifestation of allergy has been validated by
later experience and has been the subject of a
great deal of medical interest and research
just recently.
Dr. Silkworth’s was a
great contribution to the establishment and
development of the alcoholic treatment center
at Knickerbockers Hospital in New York. In
later years, he was sought out for
consultation and advice by doctors and by
those in charge of state and city alcoholic
treatment projects. There was a steady stream
of visitors, some of them from foreign lands.
Also, every day, there were long distance
telephone calls from those seeking further
help, those seeking his advice - all over the
U.S.
There remain these things
to be noted: Dr. Silkworth was a small man,
well under medium height. His complexion was
ruddy. His remarkable eyes have been
mentioned. His hair was snow white and no
member of A.A. knew him otherwise, for he was
already well along in years when our
relationship began. You would say that the
habitual expression of his face was a smile
you thought about it, and realized that the
features were really nearly always in repose,
and the impression of a smile arose actually
from a certain light about his face. ( Too
many of us have noticed it to be mistaken!)
He loved to be well dressed
- was, in fact, quite dapper - and in this he
was not without a certain whimsical and self-
recognized vanity. Nurses - the hospital staff
- everyone who worked with him quite plainly
and simply adored him. He was unfailingly
gentle, courteous, thoughtful. He was happily
married, and he and Mrs. Silkworth shared a
delight in growing things - in flowers - in
gardening.
He was utterly and
completely indifferent to money, to position,
to personal gain or prestige of any kind.
He was a saintly man.
We drunks can thank
Almighty God that such a man was designated by
the divine Providence to inspire and guide us,
individually and as a group, on the long way
back to sanity.
And now - in this
anonymously written journal of an anonymous
society - I hope I may be permitted, in
closing, the anomaly of a personal note. You
see, Dr. Silkworth saved my life. I was one of
those “hopeless” ones whom he reached and
brought back to life - to A.A. - and to God.
And I have wanted very much to write this
tribute faithfully and well, in the name of
all those who share my debt and gratitude. And
yet I have realized from the beginning that
this article will please nobody. To those who
knew and loved the saintly doctor, it will
seem insufficient. And so, some of those who
didn’t know him will think it overdone, for
the truth about Dr. Silkworth is strong
medicine in a materialistic age.
This dilemma would be
tolerable, were it not for a third difficulty:
I have written all along in the uneasy
knowledge that what is said here is by no
means pleasing to the doctor himself. The
incident of physical death certainly has not
placed him beyond knowledge of what goes on
here below. And that he will not be pleased
with all this, because while he was stern
about very few things, he was sternly and
seriously opposed to the publication of his
own name and fame.
I
take comfort, however, in the fact that his
sense of humor most certainly will have
survived his recent transition to a new home.
And I feel sure that his disapproval of the
present essay will be tempered by amusement,
and by the priceless gift he gave us all so
freely while he was yet as we are - his great
love.
Copyright © A.A. Grapevine, Inc
from the May, 1951 issue |
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