New York and Akron · 1935
Bill spent months preaching to drunks and sobered up no one. The doctor told him to lead with the facts.
“Stop preaching at them … and give them the hard medical facts first.”
Bill W. left Towns Hospital in December 1934 on fire to help other drunks. He found them at a mission and at Towns itself, and he and his wife, Lois, took some into their home in Brooklyn.
He told them about the white light and about God. Months later, by his own count about six, not one of them was sober. He had kept only himself sober.
Dr. Silkworth told him why. Bill was preaching. Give them the medical facts first, the doctor said: the obsession, the allergy, how deadly it is. A drunk who knew he was sick might then listen to the rest.
In May 1935, stuck in Akron, Ohio, after a failed business deal, Bill found himself alone in a hotel lobby, wanting a drink. He made phone calls instead. They led him to a surgeon who could not stop drinking: Dr. Bob.
This time Bill led with the illness, and with his own story. “In other words,” Dr. Bob wrote later, “he talked my language.”
It’s the spring of 1935. Bill W. has been sober for five months, and he has spent them trying to sober up other drunks. He found them at a mission, and at Towns Hospital. He took some of them home. He told every one of them about the light, and about God. Not one of them stayed sober.
Dr. Silkworth told him why. Stop preaching, he said. Give them the hard medical facts first: the obsession, the allergy, how deadly it is. Then they may listen to the rest.
In May, on a business trip gone bad, Bill found himself alone in a hotel lobby in Akron, Ohio, wanting a drink. He picked up the phone instead. It led him to a surgeon who couldn’t stop drinking.
This time Bill didn’t preach. He talked about the illness, and about himself. Dr. Bob said later that Bill talked his language.
About a month later, Dr. Bob had his last drink.
Before and after
Bill’s message didn’t change between New York and Akron. The order did.
“Sober” here means what Bill reported at the time. No one kept records of the men he worked with in New York.
New York · Dec 1934 to spring 1935
Bill led with his experience at Towns and the ideas of the Oxford Group, the Christian fellowship that had reached him. He worked with scores of drunks at a mission and at the hospital, and took some of them home.
After about six months: no one sober but Bill.
AA Comes of Age, p. 13; Alcoholics Anonymous, Foreword to the Second Edition
Akron · May 1935
Bill told Dr. Bob about the illness, the obsession of the mind and the allergy of the body, and about his own drinking. “I had quit preaching,” he said later.
About a month later: Dr. Bob’s last drink.
Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, p. 68; Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 180
Why it lasted
Your own drinking, then the illness, then the spiritual answer. The Big Book’s chapter “Working with Others” still sets out that order for anyone carrying the message to a newcomer.
For a closer look
How the story of the advice changed, the lobby where AA nearly didn’t start, and a date AA still celebrates.
Bill told the story of the doctor’s advice many times, and the words shifted with each telling.
1957. In AA Comes of Age: “Stop preaching at them … and give them the hard medical facts first.” Then, the doctor added, they might accept “those spiritual ideas of yours, and even a higher Power.”
1957, again. Later in the same book, Bill tells it at length. The doctor says Bill is “preaching at these alcoholics” and has “the cart before the horse”: “So give them the medical business, and give it to them hard.”
1975. In Robert Thomsen’s biography of Bill, the doctor is blunter still: “Pour it on. Say it’s as lethal as cancer.”
Every version agrees on the order: the illness first, the spiritual answer after.
Bill had come to Akron in May 1935 as part of a fight for control of a small company, the National Rubber Machinery Company. His side lost. Alone in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel on a Saturday, he could hear the bar at one end. At the other stood a directory of local churches.
He went to the directory. A chain of phone calls, starting with an Episcopal minister, Walter Tunks, led him to Henrietta Seiberling, who knew a surgeon who could not stop drinking. The next day, Sunday, May 12, Bill met Dr. Bob at the gate lodge where she lived, on the Seiberling estate, Stan Hywet Hall. They talked from five in the afternoon until after eleven.
AA dates its founding to Dr. Bob’s last drink, which it gives as June 10, 1935.
That June, Dr. Bob went to a medical convention in Atlantic City and came home drunk. A few days later, with an operation to perform, he took a bottle of beer from Bill to steady his hands. It was the last drink of his life.
Historians have since pointed out that the American Medical Association’s convention that year ran from June 10 to 14, which would put the last drink closer to June 17. AA still celebrates June 10.