Joe and Charlie Big Book Study – “The Doctor’s Opinion” – Joe W.

About This Speaker Tape

This session is the opening of the Joe and Charlie Big Book Study, walking attendees through "The Doctor's Opinion" — the letter and follow-up statement from Dr. Silkworth that sets up the entire Big Book. Charlie opens with the history: early doctors like Trotter and Benjamin Rush suspected alcoholism was an illness but had no answer, and it wasn't until Silkworth — working at Towns Hospital after losing everything in the 1929 crash — watched alcoholics cycle in and out that he formed the theory Bill W. would act on. Silkworth wrote the piece anonymously in the first edition because the medical profession would have thrown him out; by the second edition in 1955, the AMA had recognized alcoholism as an illness and he let his name be used.

Charlie then opens the text at Roman numeral page XXIV and walks through Silkworth's key claim: the body of the alcoholic is quite as abnormal as his mind. He spends most of the session unpacking the word "allergy" — going to the dictionary definition of "abnormal reaction" and describing in vivid first-person detail how normal drinkers feel dizzy, nauseous, and sedated after two drinks while the alcoholic gets a stimulating, in-control, get-up-and-go-somewhere feeling and a physical craving demanding more. He uses the fish-allergy analogy to show how the mind, left to its own resources, eventually gives permission to drink again.

In the back half, Joe and Charlie move to Roman numeral 26 and the mental side of the two-fold illness: men and women drink because they like the effect produced by alcohol, and when sober they become restless, irritable, and discontented, remembering only the ease and comfort of a few drinks and forgetting the jailhouses and wreckage. Charlie describes his own kid-on-the-outside emotional life, the night moonshine let him ask a girl to dance, and the cycle of willpower failing once the mind stops seeing anything wrong with the next drink. They close by pointing forward to the psychic change — the spiritual experience the Twelve Steps are designed to produce — as the only place the problem can actually be attacked.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Early medical history u2014 Dr. Trotter and Benjamin Rush suspected alcoholism was an illness but had no solution
• 3:30 Dr. Silkworth's story u2014 Towns Hospital, 1930, watching alcoholics cycle in and out
• 7:00 Silkworth tells Bill W. the alcoholic is powerless; agrees to write 'The Doctor's Opinion' anonymously
• 10:30 Opening page XXIV u2014 the body is quite as abnormal as the mind
• 14:00 Charlie goes to the dictionary to define allergy as an abnormal reaction
• 18:00 How normal drinkers feel vs. Charlie's tingling, exciting, in-control reaction to alcohol
• 24:00 Page 6 u2014 phenomenon of craving limited to this class, never in the average temperate drinker
• 32:00 The fish-allergy analogy u2014 mind gives permission, then the allergy takes over
• 38:00 Page 26 u2014 men and women drink because they like the effect produced by alcohol
• 48:00 Willpower fails because just before the drink, the mind sees nothing wrong with drinking
• 54:00 The psychic change u2014 only the Twelve Steps can expel the obsession and produce recovery