Dr. Bob's Drugless Guide to Mental Health

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This aspect of Dr. Bob’s reading was considered so important that his Bible was donated to the King School Group (A.A. Number One), and it is taken to the podium at the beginning of each meeting, to this very day a ceremony the author personally witnessed in the company of Dr. Bob’s daughter Sue. Dr. Bob has never fully shown or revealed his face, but he appears to be a tall pale Caucasian male dressed in brown work pants and a red sweater with a white lab coat sporting a bright orange name tag with his name on it.

At the end of most of his videos, the antagonistic SCP that was the focus of the video may appear before Dr. Bob, though the Doctor will always appear to ward them off, outsmart them or even fight them off single-handedly. AAs were told by Sam Shoemaker, by the Oxford Group, and by their own literature that they needed to find God and find Him now! Sam Shoemaker wrote on this topic a great deal. So did Leslie D. Weatherhead in books that Bill Wilson owned or may have owned. So did the other writers. Some books and pamphlets were very frequently mentioned by A.A.’s pioneers. They were: the Bible, The Upper Room, My Utmost for His Highest, The Runner’s Bible, the Glenn Clark books, the E. Stanley Jones books, James Allen’s As a Man Thinketh, Henry Drummond’s The Greatest Thing in the World, the Emmet Fox books, Harold Begbie’s books, two Lewis Browne books, William James, Carl Jung, the Oxford Group literature, and Sam Shoemaker’s books.

If early AAs wanted to know God’s instructions on faith, believing, prayer, study of His Word, forgiveness, healing, deliverance, love, restitution, service, resentment, fear, selfishness, dishonesty, their literature was replete with road maps to pertinent sections of the Bible and teachings about these things. What success attended his efforts, as well as the efforts of the sisters and all who worked with the many patients who passed through that ward, is now a matter of AA history. It will ever remain a monument to the memory of R. H. S., M. D. — and Dr. Bob, the man. To this very day, A.A.’s basic text speaks of the alcoholic’s need to change. Early AAs were given specifics on what they were to change from, where to obtain the power to change, and what they were to change to. His first discovery in his search for the facts of life on the campus was that joining the boys for a brew seemed to make up the greater part of after-class recreation. From Dr. Bob’s point of view it was the major extra-curricular activity. It had long been evident that whatever Rob did, he did well. He became a leader in the sport. He drank for the sheer fun of it and suffered little or no ill- effects. His years at Dartmouth were spent doing exactly what he wanted to do with little thought of the wishes or feelings of others—a state of mind which became more and more pre- dominant as the years passed. Rob graduated in 1902 …“summa cum laude” in the eyes of the drinking fraternity. The dean had a somewhat lower estimate. Early A.A. was not about “relationships anonymous.” Whether they read the Bible, the Ten Commandments, or the Four Absolutes, AAs were given much instruction on how to behave in accordance with God’s will. This is true today in only a very limited

In the summers the family often spent some weeks in a cottage by the sea. Here Bob became an expert swimmer. He and his foster sister, Nancy, spent many hours building and sailing their own sailboats. It was here that he saved a young girl from drowning. We will cover our bibliographies in a moment. But here there should be a list of some particularly popular spiritual books early AAs read and which were read by Dr. Bob as well: James Allen’s As A Man Thinketh; Glenn Clark’s Fishers of Men, Two or Three Gathered Together, How to Find Health Through Prayer, and Touchdowns for the Though they may not realize it today, AAs received a rich body of instruction concerning the body of Christ, from the Book of Acts and the many Christian materials they read. They learned the intended meaning of the fellowship of the Spirit, and how God worked with His children where two or three were gathered together. Dr. Bob was intensely interested in the efficacy of prayer, and his library bespeaks this interest. Among his many books about the subject of prayer were Glenn Clark’s The Soul’s Sincere Desire, Starr Daily’s Recovery, Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Charles and Cora Filmore’s Teach Us to Pray, Emmet Fox’s Getting Results by Prayer, Gerald Heard’s A Preface to Prayer, Frank Laubach’s Prayer (Mightiest Force in the World), Charles M. Layman’s A Primer of Prayer, William R. Parker’s Prayer Can Change Your Life, and F. L. Rawson’s The Nature of True Prayer.

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After those long disastrous binges, when Dr. Bob was forced to face his father he had a deep feeling of guilt. His father always met the situation quietly, “Well, what did this one cost you?” he would ask. Oddly enough this feeling of guilt would come, not because he felt that he had hurt him in any way, but because his father seemed, somehow, to under- stand. It was this quiet, hopeless understanding that pained him. Dr. Shoemaker’s books of the 1920’s and 1930’s were, of course, Oxford Group books, but the author found in the possession of Dr. Bob’s family the following books written by other Oxford Group people: For Sinner’s Only by A. J. Russell, He That Cometh by Geoffrey Allen, Soul Surgery by Howard A. Walter, What is The Oxford Group? by the Layman with a Notebook, Life Changers by Harold Begbie, Twice Born Men by Harold Begbie (written before the Group was formed), New Lives for Old by Amelia Reynolds, and One Thing I Know by A. J. Russell. Anne Smith recommended some of these as life-changing stories. Also some of the Shoemaker titles written for that purpose. It seems apparent from Dr. Bob’s remarks about the immense amount of Oxford Group literature he had read and the immense amount of reading he did that his Oxford Group reading included many more than the foregoing titles. While Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith thoroughly appreciated the spirit of personal gratitude that usually prompted such superlatives, he never took them seriously as applicable to himself. He rose up to tell with all humility the simple story of an alcoholic’s return to sobriety. Dr. Bob seldom called upon his vast experience with others. He simply repeated in different ways the story of one man’s great return. And that was his own.

While the boy, Rob, was high- spirited, considered rebellious and wayward, he was also industrious and labored long and hard at anything he really wanted to do. He wanted, above all else, to become a medical doctor like his maternal grand- father. Dr. Bob's Nightmare". Alcoholics Anonymous: the story of how many thousands of men and women have recovered from alcoholism (PDF) (4thed.). New York, New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services. 2002. ISBN 1-893007-16-2. OCLC 408888189 . Retrieved 14 February 2012. It then happened that Dr. Bob and Anne were thrown in with a crowd of people who attracted Dr. Bob because of their poise, health and happiness. These people spoke of their problems without embarrassment, a thing he could never do. They all seemed very much at ease. Above all, they seemed happy. They were members of the Oxford Group. Self-conscious, ill at ease most of the time, his health nearing the breaking point, Dr. Bob was thoroughly miserable. He sensed that these newfound friends had something that he did not have. He felt that he could profit from them. Throughout Bill Wilson’s leadership in A.A., he talked much of his famous “hot flash” experience. He pointed to William James’s book The Varieties of Religious Experience as a validation of what had occurred to him. It is fair to say that neither Dr. Bob nor most AAs ever had anything like Bill’s experience. But their reading did define for them what it meant to be converted, to have a conversion experience, to experience the presence of God, and so on. The Confessions of St. Augustine, The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, and The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence were all owned by Bob and were frequently quoted by the writers whose books Bob read.These are mentioned in A.A. histories. And they were mentioned in pamphlets and bulletins put out by A.A. offices and groups. They were also mentioned by many of the surviving families and pioneers the author interviewed.

Moreover, one could not, as Dr. Bob said, claim he had read an immense amount of Oxford Group literature, without having read many Shoemaker books. Shoemaker was the most prolific Oxford Group writer, was in touch with Oxford Group people in Akron, and was a close friend of Bill Wilson’s. Therefore, though the following were the Shoemaker books the author found in possession of Dr. Bob’s family, there must have been many others: Children of the Second Birth, Confident Faith, If I Be Lifted Up, The Conversion of the Church, Twice-Born Ministers, and One Boy’s Influence. There were also popular Shoemaker pamphlets, titled Three Levels of Life and What If I Had but One Sermon to Preach? Robert Holbrook Smith was born on August 8th 1879 in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. After graduation from Dartmouth College in 1902, he completed his medical training at Rush Medical School in Chicago. While attending college, he became a steady drinker; a situation that progressed until his recovery. In 1915, some 17 years after he had first met her, he married his high school sweetheart Anne Ripley and brought her to Akron. Even though he became a successful surgeon, he continued to struggle with alcoholism. Dr. Bob’s reasoning was quite typical at this time, if not quite logical. It would make very little difference if he did take a few drinks now. The liquor that he and his friends had bought in amounts according to the size of their bank accounts would soon be gone. He could come to no harm. He was soon to learn the facts of the Great American Experiment.

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In January 1933, Bob Smith attended a lecture by Frank Buchman, the founder of the Oxford Group. For the next two years Smith attended local meetings of the group in an effort to solve his alcoholism, but recovery eluded him until he met Bill Wilson on May 12, 1935. Wilson was an alcoholic who had learned how to stay sober, thus far only for some limited amounts of time, through the Oxford Group in New York, and was close to discovering long-term sobriety by helping other alcoholics. Wilson was in Akron on business that had proven unsuccessful and he was in fear of relapsing. Recognizing the danger, he made inquiries about any local alcoholics he could talk to and was referred to Smith by Henrietta Seiberling, one of the leaders of the Akron Oxford Group. After talking to Wilson, Smith stopped drinking and invited Wilson to stay at his home. He relapsed almost a month later while attending a professional convention in Atlantic City. Returning to Akron on June 9, he was given a few drinks by Wilson to avoid delirium tremens. He drank one beer the next morning to settle his nerves so he could perform an operation, which proved to be the last alcoholic drink he would ever have. The date, June 10, 1935, is celebrated as the anniversary of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. Shoemaker said you could understand and know God by following Jesus Christ’s suggestion in John 7:17 by conducting an “experiment of faith.” Once AAs abandoned the Bible, the discussions of the Creator, and their reliance on coming to God through His Son, they began to lose understanding of God. They began talking of a higher power which could be a group, a lightbulb, a door knob, a chair, and nonsense which could not be found in early A.A. nor in the literature early AAs read. All through this period he was drinking as much as purse allowed, still without getting into any serious trouble. But he wasn’t making any headway either. He still wanted to be a doctor. It was time he was about it. He quit his job at the store and that Fall entered the University of Michigan as a pre-medical student. Again he was free of all restraint. Earnestly, he got down to the serious business of drinking as much as he could and still make it to class in the morning. His famous capacity for beer followed him to the Michigan campus. He was elected to member- ship in the drinking fraternity. Once again he displayed the wonders of his “patent throat” before his gaping brothers. Like his fellow SCP animator Detective Void, Dr. Bob is theorized to be a human of possible anomalous origins due to interacting with many other SCPs. Some of these would normally be fatal for any other human being but the doctor merely brushes them off.