Central Park West · 1933–1934
He was the first to tell Bill his drinking was an illness. Then he told Lois it was hopeless.
“…the obsession of the mind that compels us to drink and the allergy of the body that condemns us to go mad or die.”
Towns Hospital was a private hospital for alcoholics and addicts at 293 Central Park West. Its owner, Charles B. Towns, was a former salesman who promoted his own cure. A five-day stay cost $200 to $350, a fortune in the Depression.
Bill W. could not pay. His brother-in-law, Dr. Leonard Strong, covered his stays.
The hospital’s chief physician was William Silkworth. He told Bill something no one had told him before: that he was not weak but sick. His body reacted to alcohol in a way other people’s did not, and his mind had become obsessed with drinking.
The explanation gave Bill and Lois hope. It did not keep him sober for long. By the summer of 1934, the doctor had a harder message for Lois.
This is Towns Hospital, on Central Park West, in the middle of the Depression. It was a private hospital for drunks who could pay, or whose families could. Bill W.’s brother-in-law paid for his.
Here Bill met a small, white-haired doctor named William Silkworth. Silkworth told him something no one ever had: his drinking was not a moral failing. It was an illness. An obsession of the mind, and an allergy of the body.
Bill left full of hope. Within a few months, he was drinking again.
He came back, and came back again. In the summer of 1934, Silkworth gave Lois his verdict. Her husband, he said, was hopeless. To save his life, he would probably have to be locked away.
That December, Bill walked through these doors one last time.
One patient, one doctor
Between the fall of 1933 and December 1934, Bill W. was admitted to Towns Hospital four times. Each stay ended differently.
Dates follow Pass It On, AA’s biography of Bill. Other accounts differ on the first three stays; Silkworth’s biographer dates Bill’s first treatment to 1932.
Autumn 1933
Bill’s brother-in-law, Dr. Leonard Strong, pays for his first stay. Silkworth tells Bill his drinking is not a lack of willpower but an illness: an obsession of the mind and an allergy of the body. Bill leaves “a new man,” and stays sober for weeks, perhaps months.
Pass It On, pp. 99–104
Early summer 1934
After a spring in Vermont, Bill is drinking again and lands back at Towns. This time he leaves without any of the old confidence.
Pass It On, pp. 105–107
Midsummer 1934
On a hot summer night, Silkworth tells Lois that her husband is hopeless. To keep him from madness or death, he will probably have to be locked away.
Pass It On, pp. 107–109; AA Comes of Age, p. 52
December 11, 1934
Bill walks in having drunk three of four beers bought on credit, waving the fourth. They are the last drinks of his life.
Continue to 3 · The BedsidePass It On, pp. 119–120; AA Comes of Age, ch. 2
For a closer look
The questions historians still argue about, and where this story comes from.
Charles B. Towns sold his treatment as a cure for alcohol and drug addiction. He developed it with Dr. Alexander Lambert, a Cornell professor and physician to Theodore Roosevelt.
It combined belladonna, henbane and prickly ash with strong laxatives such as castor oil, given around the clock for about two days. One person who remembered the hospital described it as a place where alcoholics were “purged and puked.”
For what the belladonna may have had to do with Bill’s experience, see 3 · The Bedside.
The hospital’s own 1918 brochure promised “absolute privacy,” meals served in patients’ rooms, private baths and telephones, and a solarium “on the roof,” “fitted up in garden style.” Its upper floors looked out over Central Park.
Even the basic facts of Bill’s stays at Towns are tangled. Some accounts say he met Silkworth on his first stay; others say the second. Bill himself remembered waking to find the doctor at his bedside “that first time.”
Accounts of when Silkworth started at Towns range from 1924 to 1932; Pass It On says 1930, his biographer 1929. Where accounts differ, these pages say so rather than quietly picking a side.