St. Thomas Hospital · 1939–1940
In August 1939 she took in Dr. Bob’s patient under a polite fiction. Within months, with a young priest’s report and her superior’s blessing, the fiction had become a program.
“You know, Doctor, this sounds to me like a terrible case of indigestion.”
What happened on the day Dr. Bob brought her his first patient is told, in her words, in The flower room. Every later account changes something, and Six tellings sets them side by side. Every telling that gives a year says 1939, except Bill W.’s last, which says 1940; the two that give a month say August. What came next is clearest in her own 1957 letter to Bill: she kept taking his patients, quietly.
At first, Darrah writes, she put them two to a double room, so the men and their AA visitors could talk without disturbing anyone, and so each could steady the other before the nurses noticed. She also disguised them. She entered them, she wrote in that letter, “under varied diagnoses,” and spread them over different floors, because she feared that too many in one place “would bring about open rebellion.” Because she ran admissions and he was on the staff, she could place them herself.
One worry held her back. AA had grown up inside the Oxford Group, and she didn’t want the hospital drawn into a religious sect. A nun couldn’t go out to an evening meeting, so she asked a young priest, Father Vincent Haas, to go for her. By then the Akron members had left the Oxford Group (late in 1939) and were meeting at King School. He came back impressed. If AA held to its course, he told her, it could grow into one of the age’s great movements against alcoholism.
With his report in hand, she and Dr. Bob went to the hospital’s administrator, Sister Clementine. In Darrah’s telling they confessed that they had been treating alcoholics on the quiet, and brought sober AA members along as proof. She gave the plan her blessing, and the church approved it too. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers names the monsignor of the Akron Catholic deanery; Darrah names the diocese and the hospital’s trustees. Sister Ignatia remembered the Reverend Mother telling the committee, “There was a time in years gone by when alcoholics were a great trial to us.” She dated the working agreement “probably, January, 1940.”
Bill W.’s 1966 memorial tells a simpler story, of a stranger at the desk and a joke about indigestion, and dates it 1940. In January 1952, when an AA Grapevine summary put the start at St. Thomas in 1942, she wrote to Bill to set the record straight: “Our records establish that the first AA patient treated at St. Thomas Hospital, Akron, was admitted on August 16, 1939.” August 16 or 18? has the rest. The ward that grew from those first beds is the subject of The man you married.
It’s August 1939, at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron. Dr. Bob needs a bed for a very sick drunk, and hospitals don’t take drunks. So Sister Ignatia finds another name for what’s wrong with him.
Years later, Bill W. told it as a joke between the two of them. Sister says it sounds like a terrible case of indigestion. Dr. Bob agrees: his indigestion is terrible. Her biographer gives a different label: acute gastritis.
More patients follow, two to a room, entered as nervous breakdowns, or under observation. A man with a black eye becomes a possible head injury. She spreads them over different floors, so there are never too many in one place.
And once she’s sure this AA is not some strange sect, she goes to her superior and tells her everything.
Who told it, and when
The first patient she took in for Dr. Bob became one of AA’s favorite stories, and every telling is a little different: the room, the excuse, even the year. Here they are in the order each was set down.
Two are her own, from the 1950s and from a 1960 speech; three are Bill W.’s; the last is her biographer’s. The scene itself, in her words, is told in The flower room, in I Just Work Here. Quotations are short excerpts.
“I was a little shaky inside.”
Dr. Bob promised his patient would cause no trouble, so she took him. The next morning he asked for a private room for the man’s visitors. There were no beds, so she had one pushed into the room where the flowers were arranged. She mentions no diagnosis. August 1939.
Her recollections, recorded in the 1950s. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers (1980), chapter XIV.
“This rare pair immediately bootlegged a shaking alkie into a tiny two-bed ward.”
The patient objected to having no privacy (he “kicked like a steer,” Bill wrote), so she moved him to the flower room. 1939.
“Another Fragment of History,” AA Grapevine, February 1954. The Language of the Heart.
“Doctor, we do not have any beds, much less private rooms, but I will do what I can.”
Here the night supervisor’s dislike of alcoholics comes first. Dr. Bob arrives asking for a private room, and she gets the man into the flower room on the sly.
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age (1957), Bill’s history of AA.
In her notes for a talk at AA’s twenty-fifth anniversary convention in Long Beach, she summed it up in four short sentences: a doctor, himself recovered, wanted a patient admitted, and a room was free. Darrah calls it a sample of her humility. Darrah’s endnotes credit the same speech notes for the 1992 line.
Her notes for the speech, July 1, 1960, quoted in Darrah (1992), chapter 1.
“How right you are—his indigestion is most terrible.”
Dr. Bob’s answer to her suggestion at the top of this page. In this version he knows no one in authority and tells his story to the nun at the admissions desk as a stranger. No single room is free, so a bed goes into the flower room, and the two confess to the Superior afterward. 1940.
“For Sister Ignatia,” AA Grapevine, August 1966. The Language of the Heart.
“Doctor, I believe this patient is suffering from acute gastritis.”
Her line, as Darrah prints it from Sister Ignatia’s 1960 speech notes. The patient has a name, Walter B., and a date, August 16, 1939, though some records say the 18th. He goes first into a double room; the flower room comes when Dr. Bob asks for privacy for his visitors.
Darrah, chapter 1, from her 1960 speech notes.
Under other names
Bill’s joke had a basis in fact, though only he says indigestion. Lois W. remembered the pair “tagging an alcoholic with any ailment—heart disease, kidney trouble.” Sister Ignatia herself listed the ones she used, in a 1957 letter to Bill: “medical observation, nervous breakdown,” or for a man with a black eye, “possible head injury.”
For a closer look
The priest who checked AA for her, the argument over a date, and who exactly said yes.
Father Vincent Haas was newly ordained when Sister Ignatia first called on him, a few days before she sent him to the meeting. She wanted him to reason with a drinker whose wife was expecting a baby. He tried for an hour, and then the man asked him the question above. No, the priest said, he didn’t drink. “Then you don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said. “Come back when you’ve been drinking a week.”
Soon afterward she asked if he understood alcoholism. “I wish I did,” he said. So she asked him to look into AA for her. “She couldn’t go out, being a sister,” he recalled. In her own account, given to Bill W. in 1954 and quoted by Darrah, she asked “a little priest” from a nearby parish to sit in on a meeting because she was afraid of being “called on the carpet for getting mixed up, somehow.” Around the same time he heard alcoholic patients’ confessions for her when the hospital chaplain wouldn’t; The man you married tells that story.
Darrah names the first patient: Walter B., who had joined the Akron fellowship in September 1935 and since relapsed, and who regularly dosed himself with paregoric, an opium remedy then sold over the counter. The date is less certain. AA’s archives, her order’s and Rosary Hall’s give August 16 and August 18 interchangeably, Darrah found, and St. Thomas could not settle it. She chose the 16th because Sister Ignatia used it most.
Sister Ignatia was sure. In early 1952 an AA Grapevine summary of AA history said St. Thomas had first opened to AA in 1942, and gave Knickerbocker Hospital in New York credit for the first hospital plan. On January 24 she wrote to Bill W. with the sentence quoted above, and added, coolly, “I do not raise the issue of Honesty, one of the Four Absolutes,” since there was no reason to think the errors were deliberate. Bill answered that her letter had “caused me not a little distress,” and the Grapevine’s managing editor wrote that the Knickerbocker plan dated only from 1949 and had learned from St. Thomas, among other hospitals.
Who approved the plan depends on who tells it. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers says Sister Ignatia and Dr. Bob won over the monsignor of the Akron Catholic deanery and “the Reverend Mother Clementine, who was administrator of St. Thomas.” Darrah calls her Sister Clementine, the administrator, and says the plan went on to the hospital’s trustees and then the diocese. Clementine became head of the whole order only in 1943, so “Reverend Mother,” in Sister Ignatia’s memory of 1954, was probably the title Clementine held by then.
Bill W., in 1966, has the Superior hear their confession and then go before the trustees, after which Dr. Bob was asked to join the staff. By AA’s own history he had been on the courtesy staff since 1934.
Darrah claims more for that winter than anyone else: St. Thomas became, in her words, “the first religious institution in history to officially adopt a permanent policy” of treating alcoholics. The 1950 plaque in the ward (Bill wrote the words, he said; Darrah credits her with them) says only that it was the first religious institution “to open its door to our Society.”