Dr. Bob's Drugless Guide to Mental Health

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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. Now he held a Dartmouth diploma, but the desire to become a medical doctor was still with him. His mother, who had never approved of this career for her son, hadn’t altered her views. For the next two years he worked for a large scale company; then he went to Montreal where he labored at selling railway supplies, and heavy hardware. He left Montreal and went to Filene’s store in Boston. Bob frequently spoke of God as a God of love. He summarized A.A.’s ideas as being, in their essence, “love and service.”

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.

Timeline

Dr. Bob and everyone that knew him well in the early A.A. days spoke of the immense amount of reading he did. He read the Bible through three times and studied it daily. As he put it: The faculty had other ideas. After a long argument they allowed him to return to take his exams. He passed them creditably. After many more painful discussions, the faculty also gave him his credits. That Fall he entered Brush University as a junior. Here his drinking became so much worse that his fraternity brothers felt forced to send for his father. The Judge made the long journey in a vain effort to get him straightened out. Dr. Bob recalled, bottom 96- PG97 from DR bob and good old timers—said that many early ideas A.A.’s fundamental ideas came from the study of the Bible and that he personally did not write or have anything to do with the later writing of the 12 Steps. In Dr. Bob’s mind, the Steps in their deepest essence simply mean “love and service.”

Dr. Bob was a humble man. His humility was born, no doubt, of his humiliations before his good wife, Anne, and his colleagues in the medical profession. This led to the great step of becoming humble before his God. Here was the crisis in his life: at last, he found the God who he knew would help him if he would only place a humble confidence in him. This is the story of Dr. Bob. It is the story, too, of the Twelve Steps that logically follow, once the situation is faced with honest realism. 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.superlatives. While he lived, he laughed them off. And now, though he is dead, I feel that he still laughs them off. I sat beside him many times at the speakers’ table and watched him squirm as some florid introduction was being given him. Many a chairman of the meeting strove to rise to the responsibility of introducing him by referring to him as co-founder of the “ greatest, most wonderful, most magnificent, most momentous movement of all time.” Dr. Bob whispered to me on one of these occasions, “ The speaker certainly takes in a lot of territory and plenty of time.” 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. I read everything I could find, and talked to everyone who I thought knew anything about it (DR. BOB, p. 56). 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. Dr. Bob’s interest in Jesus’ sermon was exemplified not only by the many times he studied and quoted it, but also by the foregoing books as well as the following specific studies of the Sermon on the Mount: Studies in the Sermon on the Mount by Oswald Chambers, The Christ of the Mount by E. Stanley Jones, The Sermon on the Mount by Emmet Fox, and The Soul’s Sincere Desire and I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes by Glenn Clark.

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. Of the Oxford Group books and the Bible] . . . I had done an immense amount of reading they had recommended. I had refreshed my memory of the Good Book, and I had had excellent training in that as a youngster (The Co-Founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 11-12).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 Like most SCP channels out there, Dr. Bob presents all SCPs in a direct and informative way. However, instead of simply presenting the SCPs details right away, he presents a fictional scenario where that the SCP in question is a part of, often in a horrific and tragic way. After this, the facts of the SCP are presented.