Illustration · An imagined office at St. Thomas Hospital on the day before a patient goes home: two chairs turned toward each other in front of Sister Ignatia’s desk, and a wife’s handbag on one of them. Not drawn from a photograph.

The man you married

On the alcoholic ward at St. Thomas, she urged the patients to pray, helped them with their inventories, and on the day before a man went home, went to work on his marriage.

“We wouldn’t use valuable hospital space if we were in the business just to sober people up.”

Sister Ignatia, telling a patient’s wife about the ward, as she recalled it in the 1950s · Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, 1980

Five to seven days

The alcoholics Dr. Bob brought to St. Thomas Hospital in Akron didn’t get their own ward all at once. By 1941, Darrah writes, they had a four-bed room, number 228. Then the head of nursing complained that her nurses hadn’t trained to treat drunks, and the hospital’s new superior told Sister Ignatia to stop. She asked the superior, “Why was our community established if not to administer to the body and reach the soul?” and won. Another room, across the corridor, made six beds, but other patients resented the AA men’s visitors at all hours, and some doctors and nurses grumbled about beds wasted on drunks. So she bargained the six beds away for a wing nobody liked working in, behind heavy double doors and out of the nurses’ sight. The ward opened there on April 19, 1944, with Sister Ignatia, the nun from the admitting office, in charge: eight beds, one of them a cot kept for emergencies, a coffee bar, a lounge for visitors, a refrigerator and a door of its own into the chapel’s choir loft.

The flower room, in I Just Work Here, tells how it began and what its rules were. This is the ward as she saw it. At first she and Dr. Bob tried to give each patient privacy for his AA visitors, but they found the men did better two or four to a room. Helping one another, she said, kept a man “so busy assisting others that he does not have time to think of a drink.”

She put more weight on the spiritual side than many others did, and she believed Dr. Bob did too. That door to the chapel’s gallery let patients slip in whenever they liked, still in their hospital clothes. “I feel all these people run away from God,” she said. She told them to “begin to bend our knees instead of our elbows.” But she knew how to make the point to each person. Morris, a Jewish patient, felt out of place at St. Thomas. When the others went to the chapel, she suggested he kneel by his bed and pray to God as he understood Him. After that, an Akron member remembered, Morris and his wife thought her a saint.

She helped patients with the Fourth Step, an honest written inventory of themselves, and showed them how to deal with resentment and anger. She set great store by the Ninth Step, making amends to the people they had harmed, and by the 1950s she felt it wasn’t stressed the way it had been. Some of the first men came back to tell her how it had gone. She remembered one saying, “Do you know, I have the finest feeling. I feel that they are my best friends.”

Early on, Dr. Bob looked over most new patients himself. Some mornings, after his rounds, he told her, “Sister, that monkey up there doesn’t want the program.” She would plead the man’s case: a wife and family, a job at stake. Dr. Bob would shake his head. “Sister, he just isn’t ready.” He was always right, she said, and she learned that pushing the program on anyone did no good. When patients worried her, she didn’t want to trouble him with every worry, so she called his wife, Anne S. Anne would take it up with him and call back with advice, and Sister Ignatia came to rely on her calm good sense.

She often took patients on a “pay later” basis, Bill W. wrote, which sometimes worried the trustees, and when men went home to other cities, she kept writing to them. And she worked on their families. The day before a man went home, she had his wife come in. What happened next is best told the way she told it.

Listen The man you married About 1 minute

In her own words

The day before he goes home

Sister Ignatia described how she brought a patient and his wife back together. It was something she did again and again, not a story about one couple. Here it is as she told it, set out like a scene.

From her recollections in the 1950s, printed in Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers (1980), chapter XIV. She described it as her practice and named no place or year; Bill W. wrote that patients’ families got the same care from her at St. Thomas. Every quoted line comes from her, including what the wife and the husband say: theirs are her memory of what such people said. The lines in italics are a paraphrase of her account. Quotations are short excerpts.

The day before a husband goes home

She sends for his wife.

The wife“I just don’t want to see him. I’m finished with him.”

Sister Ignatia asks only that the wife come and talk to her, not to him. In her office:

Sister Ignatia“Now, you’ve traveled a long way with this man. Wouldn’t it be worthwhile taking one more chance on this program?”

Many of the men who come through the ward, she tells the wife, take hold of the program and stay sober for good. If she can put the past behind her and start again, Sister Ignatia makes her a promise.

Sister Ignatia“I assure you we’ll return to you the man you married in the first place.”

Then, when she has finished:

Sister Ignatia“Of course, you don’t want to see him.”

The wife“Well, perhaps he doesn’t want to see me.”

She tells the wife to wait. It’s up to the two of them, she says, and she won’t take sides. She goes to find the husband and takes him aside.

Sister Ignatia“You know who I have in the office? Your wife. But of course you don’t want to see her, I suppose.”

The husband“Well, I’m ashamed to talk to her.”

She offers to talk to his wife for him. Then she brings him to the office and goes in with him. Once the two of them are talking, she says she has to go out and answer the phone, “or something,” and leaves them.

Before Al-Anon

She was working with families before they had a fellowship of their own: the Al-Anon Family Groups didn’t begin until 1951, as Captain of My Soul tells. Bill W. later wrote that her work with families at Rosary Hall, her ward in Cleveland, became “a prime inspiration to the Al-Anon Family Groups of the whole region.”

For a closer look

Go deeper

Her jokes, the chaplain who didn’t want to hear the patients’ confessions, and a nice girl from a wonderful family.

Your size in pajamas

A color postcard of St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, a large brick building. — St. Thomas Hospital and School of Nursing, Akron, on a 1948 postcard, when Sister Ignatia’s ward was running.Columbus Metropolitan Library Digital Collections

She was frail and often in physical pain, Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers says, but she never lost her sense of humor. One of her jokes survives in two versions. In that book, a former patient came back to tell her he had been sober ten years. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “But don’t forget, should you ever need our services again, we still have your size in pajamas.” In Bill W.’s 1966 memorial, it was a drunk boasting that he would never set foot in the hospital again, and she told him his pajamas would be waiting.

Akron members still tell of a man flown in by private plane who begged her to pray for him. She said she would, and told him to pray for himself as well: “There’s nothing God likes to hear more than a strange voice.” Now and then she gave out St. Christopher medals, with a warning to keep the speed down. “He gets out after 50 miles an hour.”

Not welcome everywhere

Not everyone at St. Thomas welcomed the ward. She heard doctors, and even nurses, grumble that only alcoholics could get beds there, and she pretended not to hear. (Dr. Bob heard the same while he scrubbed for surgery, as The flower room tells.) The hospital’s chaplain didn’t want to hear the alcoholic patients’ confessions, Father Vincent Haas remembered, because he doubted their repentance was real. So she sneaked Father Haas, a young priest, into a quiet corner of the hospital to hear them.

In 1947 a Black patient at St. Thomas was kept off the alcoholic ward. Bill W. and Dr. Bob went to see him there, and in 1948, Francis Hartigan wrote in his biography of Bill, Sister Ignatia and Dr. Bob got the hospital to change the rule. The Only Requirement tells more.

A nice girl

In early Akron the wives were wary of women who came to meetings on their own, and those women had a harder road than the men. Even Sister Ignatia, Anne C. remembered, couldn’t see how a “nice” girl could become an alcoholic. She had known Anne’s parents and all the family since before AA began. When she found out Anne was in the program, she said, “How could this have happened to you with that wonderful family of yours? It can’t be!”

Anne asked her whether she would rather Anne went back to where she had been. “Oh no, no,” Sister Ignatia said. But for years, Anne said, she went on telling people that Anne’s drinking was a mystery to her.

By 1956, at Rosary Hall in Cleveland, women were admitted two at a time, to a room of their own, a magazine profile of her reported. People Like You has more on women in early AA.

Sources

Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. AA World Services, 1980. Chapter XIV, “A.A. and St. Thomas Hospital” (Sister Ignatia’s recollections of the ward, recorded in the 1950s; Father Vincent Haas; Morris; her jokes), and chapter XIX, “Minorities within A.A. gain acceptance” (Anne C., and the Akron wives).
Mary C. Darrah, Sister Ignatia: Angel of Alcoholics Anonymous. Loyola University Press, 1992. Chapter 3, “The Spiritual Connection” (room 228, the dispute of 1941, the move and the ward of April 19, 1944). Quotations are from the scanned text, checked against the page images.
The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “For Sister Ignatia” (August 1966), first printed in the AA Grapevine.
Glenn C., Heroes of Early Black AA: Their Stories and Their Messages. Hindsfoot Foundation, 2017. Appendix II (Francis Hartigan’s account of Bill W. and Black alcoholics, from Bill W.: A Biography, St. Martin’s Press, 2001 edition, pp. 181–182).
Gerard E. Sherry, “Sister Ignatia and the A.A.” The Sign, vol. 35, May 1956, pp. 9–11, as transcribed at silkworth.net. On Rosary Hall, her ward at St. Vincent Charity Hospital in Cleveland.
St. Thomas Hospital and School of Nursing, Akron, Ohio (postcard), 1948, Columbus Metropolitan Library. No known copyright.