The Spiritual Heroes of 12 Step Recovery
Some 20 years ago, when I was running a treatment center in Corpus Christi, I met a man named Ned Williams. Ned was a family doctor - and he referred more patients to us for treatment than anyone else in town. Ned wasn't an alcoholic but he had a unique ability to spot one a mile away. He had a quiet way of gaining the confidence and the love of his patients. People were drawn to him because of the gentle way he treated them. Ned could always see something in people that other doctors missed. One of the things I learned from Ned was the difference between a doctor and a physician. He used to say that, “every physician is a doctor but very few doctors are physicians.” According to Ned, doctors dealt with diseases - physicians dealt with whole people - body, mind and spirit. Go see a doctor and he'll check your symptoms - sort of like an auto mechanic listening to a motor. He'll diagnose what's wrong with your engine (or if he’s a proctologist, maybe what's wrong with your exhaust system) then, he'll prescribe some medication to make you run better. "Take some of this and I'll see you again at 60,000 miles."
The physician treats you very differently. He'll ask about your family and about your work and maybe look for some of the hidden stresses and fears you're up against in your life. He'll get you talking about things that you’re not used to talking about - things we have a way of carrying deep inside us - like addiction. There’s little doubt that Ned would recognize William Silkworth as a true physician – a healer who pioneered in the addiction field and treated more than 50,000 alcoholics and addicts during a lifetime of service.
William Duncan Silkworth was born on July 22, 1873 in Brooklyn, New York. He never officially finished high school due to an argument he had with his music teacher, yet he somehow managed his way into Princeton University and earned his medical degree from NYU with a specialty in neuro-psychology. Biographers wonder what enabled Silkworth to understand the “depth of despair” that alcoholics and addicts endure before some have a spiritual awakening that leads them to recovery. Perhaps for Silkworth it was the death of his only child – a son who lived but a week and the hidden pain of which his father carried silently forever.
Silkworth interned at Bellevue Hospital under some medical professors then doing cutting-edge work with alcoholics. This, along with a short stint as Medical examiner to the Knights of Columbus, may have convinced him of the burning need in our society to solve the riddle of addiction. The formula he championed drew suspicion from the doctors of his day, but it rang true in the hearts and minds of his suffering and often bewildered patients. He saw alcoholism as “an obsession of the mind that condemns one to drink and an allergy of the body that condemns one to die.” While he searched for, but never pinpointed, the exact location of this allergic reaction, the work going on today in the field of brain chemistry and addiction has all but proved him right.
Of course, Silkworth will always be remembered as the physician who treated Bill Wilson. As Medical Director for Town’s Hospital in New York, Silkworth detoxed Wilson on three separate occasions before he had his famed spiritual awakening in December 1934. It should be noted that the kind doctor believed in “telling it like it is” both to his patients and their families. Following his third treatment, Silkworth sat down with Bill and Lois and conveyed the apparent “hopelessness” of Bill’s alcoholism. Wilson later credited this conversation with having a strong effect in bringing about the “ego deflation at depth” that often precedes spiritual breakthroughs. But perhaps more important, was the contribution Silkworth made immediately following Wilson’s “white light” or “hot flash” experience that occurred around day three of his detox. Shortly after his trip to the mountaintop, he rushed to his physician and asked, “Am I going insane?” Silkworth could have cautioned his patient that the belladonna treatment he was receiving “… was apt to cause vibrant images and the mental capacity to focus on only one or two hallucinations at a time,” according to his biographer Dale Mitchell. That’s probably what most doctors would have done. But as a physician, as a humble man and a medical practitioner who believed that things happen for a reason and that the reasons for their happening are often obscured to us, Silkworth chose another path – a path for which we might all be forever grateful. He said to Bill that he wasn’t going crazy and that, “whatever he had found, he’d better hold on to it.” Wilson later said that had Silkworth discouraged his newfound relationship with “the world of spirit,” he doubted if he would have recovered.
Silkworth remained in contact with Wilson for the rest of his life. He was a strong promoter of AA and its spiritual approach to recovery, writing several articles for medical journals and helping the medical community begin to see alcoholism and drug addiction as an illness that deserved and responded favorably to treatment. Silkworth was asked by Wilson to write the “Doctor’s Opinion” that appeared in the Big Book and Wilson frequently consulted with him on many of the issues that he faced in the fellowship as it struggled and grew. When Wilson came upon a perplexing problem that Silkworth did not have the answer for, he’d usually ask Wilson to pray and go consult with the One he liked to call “the Great Physician.”
Known forever in AA history as “the little doctor who loved drunks,” Silkworth died on March 22nd 1951 at the age of 78. He died while still doing what he loved to best – helping alcoholics and addicts. A memorial article appeared in the AA Grapevine written by one of the thousands he helped to find sobriety. In it his former patient wrote: (Silkworth loved drunks – but there was nothing in the least degree fatuous or sentimental about that love. It would be an astonishing love, an almost surgical love. There was the warmest of light in those blue eyes, but still they could burn right through to the bitter core of any lie, any sham. He could see clean through egotism, bombast, self-pity and similar miserable rags that we drunks use so cleverly to hide our central fear and shame.
All this he did without hurting anyone. While insisting rigorously that recovery was possible only on a moral basis – “You cannot go two ways on a one-way street” – he never preached, never denounced, never really criticized. He brought you, somehow, to make your own judgments of yourself, the only kind of judgments that count with an alcoholic. How did he do it? “It’s a gift.” Just coming into his presence was like walking into light. He not only had vision, he gave vision.”
It’s fifty years later and he’s still giving vision to us all.