One Drunk to Another The Little Doctor
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Illustration · A small hospital ward in the 1940s, with a radio and coffee for visitors. Drawn from written descriptions; not a picture of the actual ward.

Knickerbocker Hospital · 1945–1951

Duffy’s Tavern

In his seventies, he helped open a hospital ward run on AA’s ideas. Its smallest room got a nickname.

“I think we’ll help the alcoholic more if we can first recognize that he is primarily a human being – afflicted with human nature.”

Dr. William D. Silkworth · “Slips and Human Nature,” AA Grapevine, January 1947

A ward of their own

By 1945, AA had spread across the country, but many hospitals still refused to admit alcoholics. Dr. Silkworth, now in his seventies and still at Towns, helped start something new: a ward for alcoholics at Knickerbocker Hospital, a general hospital in Harlem.

The first patient arrived on Easter Sunday, 1945. The ward ran on AA’s ideas. Patients stayed five days, at $10 a day in 1946. AA members volunteered as orderlies and came to visit, and when a patient went home, his sponsor met him and took him to a meeting.

One small room, with six beds, picked up a nickname: Duffy’s Tavern.

Silkworth was assisted by a nurse, Teddy R., whom Bill W. called “our red-headed powerhouse nurse.” He kept working with alcoholics until his death in March 1951.

Listen Duffy’s Tavern About 1 minute

Before and after

What he reported

Silkworth put numbers on what AA changed. One is a figure he quoted from another doctor; the other is his own estimate. Neither comes from a study.

Before AA: from a late talk, reprinted in Dale Mitchel’s biography (p. 180). Mitchel dates it 1949, but it mentions a book from 1950. With AA: from his July 1939 article in the Journal-Lancet. Each bar is out of 100.

Before AAThe usual cure rate, as he quoted the psychiatrist Foster Kennedy around 1950

2 in 100

With AAHow often the program worked, as he reported in 1939

About half

Read with care

“It was terrible to face that ninety-eight percent failure,” he told an AA audience around 1950. Neither figure comes from a controlled study. For what modern research finds, see Legacy.

For a closer look

Go deeper

The nurse beside him, what he wrote about members who drink again, and two accounts of how he died.

Teddy R.

Bill W. called her “our red-headed powerhouse nurse, Teddy.” In AA Comes of Age he called the pair, “Silky and Teddy,” the “Eastern counterparts” of Dr. Bob and Sister Ignatia, who ran AA’s first hospital program, at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron.

How many patients the two of them saw depends on the account. In 1957, Bill wrote that Silkworth, with Teddy’s help, had treated nearly 10,000 alcoholics at Knickerbocker alone. In 1951, just after the doctor’s death, a Grapevine tribute had put the Knickerbocker figure at 6,000. Elsewhere in the same 1957 book, the 10,000 figure covers Knickerbocker through 1954, three years after his death, which may explain the gap.

The nickname stuck, too. An unpublished report on the ward from about 1948 is titled “Duffy’s Tavern.” It calls the room “a large comfortable room with six beds, easy chairs, and a table scattered with A.A. literature.” Silkworth’s biographer credits it to him, though it reads like a visitor’s account.

Slips and human nature

In January 1947, Silkworth wrote in the AA Grapevine about members who drink again. A slip, he argued, is not a mystery peculiar to alcoholics. Heart patients and tuberculosis patients relapse too, when they feel well and stop following the doctor’s orders.

“The alcoholic slip is not a symptom of a psychotic condition,” he wrote. What keeps a recovered alcoholic going, he said, is not a set of rules but AA’s whole outlook on living.

The Grapevine thought enough of the article to print it again in 1963.

How he died

The AA Grapevine reported in April 1951 that he “died of a heart attack in his home in New York, Thursday morning, March 22.”

A Grapevine article in 1957 said “he died on the job — right among us drunks, with his boots on.” AA’s Grapevine reported at the time that he died at home, and his biographer agrees. Other accounts place his death at Towns Hospital.

In May 1951 the Grapevine ran an unsigned tribute by a member who wrote that Silkworth had saved his life. It counted 51,000 alcoholics the doctor had talked with: 45,000 at Towns and 6,000 at Knickerbocker. “He was a saintly man,” it said, as the April notice had.

Sources