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Source: Tom F – Speaker Talk at Vicksburg (1962) – 1962-06-24.mp3 File: tom-f-speaker-talk-at-vicksburg-1962-1962-06-24.mp3 Duration: 00:57:57
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Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I'm very grateful for the privilege of your letting me come here. My name is Tom F.. I am an alcoholic by vocation. I am medical director of a hospital for the treatment of alcoholism. I am also in the private practice of medicine, and the two overlap lots of times. But the most important thing that has come to us who are in the medical profession in the last few years is an attempt to establish a little report of communication between Alcoholics Anonymous and the medical profession, because most people will pay more attention to their family doctor or their minister than they will to the ones who are close to them, their loved ones. And unfortunately, until a few years ago, alcoholism as an illness was not taught in medical school. It was not taught to me, except that I learned to save all the grain alcohol I could during the week and collect it for the dance Saturday night. And you can take grain alcohol, generic chemical name for it is ethanol, and you can dilute it a little bit and put a little juniper drops in it, and you've got a pretty good drink for the dance that night. But that is about all that I was taught when I was in medical school. But now we are taught, we are attempting to teach the present-day medical students. And this is not a prejudiced statement. It is in the textbook of the Medical College of Georgia, which was written by two of the leading psychiatrists in this country. And we would have to assume that they are not saying this because their wives, mothers, brothers, or sisters are drunks, but it is an academic course which is presented to the about-to-be doctors and states that alcoholism is a disease. It is a self-imposed disease when it is active. There are many alcoholics walking the streets today who have never had a drink. It is a progressive disease.
We hear the word alcoholics and alcoholism so much until we begin to accept it. And there is about 50,000 different interpretations of it. There is a very simple one. When alcohol ceases to be a beverage and becomes a drug to the particular individual, then he or she is an alcoholic. So we have to assume that it is, or have to acknowledge that it is a disease because the U.S. Public Health Service and the American Medical Association says it is the third most prevalent disease in this country today.
Now the cause of my being an alcoholic I do not know, and frankly am not too interested in. I do not know what caused it, but I know what to do about it. And at my time of life, maybe we all in the medical profession want to work toward preventive medicine. It would be wonderful if we could eliminate ever anyone else becoming an alcoholic. And since we would, etiology or cause, as of all diseases, it must be, or could be, constitutional, psychologic, or biochemical, or anything that you want to say. But if we could just figure out a way to go through the newborn baby's place and shine lights on them, and all of them that were going to be alcoholics, they would be purple when the light shined on them, potential alcoholics. Then that would be preventive medicine, because now we do not have polio anymore, we do not have typhoid fever, we do not have smallpox, because we vaccinate against people against that. Then by shining that light on all the newborn babies, then
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we would say, now, we would mock them off, now this one, he is going to be an alcoholic if he takes a drink. So we could get through the state legislature if you knew enough politicians, you could get him to put a big red D, tattoo it on his head like this, and then you could dime or something, dime purple maybe, and then you could make it against the law to sell alcoholic beverages to anyone who was purple-headed, or had a tattoo on them. And then you would prevent, there would be no more alcoholics. Except for one thing, it says in that psychiatry book that alcoholics, many of them, particularly the informed ones and the ones who are members of AA, that is why my wife says I bought that book, are above the average. She says that is the only page I ever read, and that is not exactly the truth, and I paid $7.50 for that book. But at any rate, but you can't do it, that wouldn't work, because if they are above average, they would be so smart, they would find a colorblind bartender, and he wouldn't know they were purple-headed, and he'd go right ahead and sell them liquor, and you'd end up with another active alcoholic. But do you know if we could convince, I was classified as a hopeless alcoholic by the psychiatrists of Augusta up and down the East Coast, as just some hopeless, they didn't say alcoholic, they just said I was hopeless. And it wasn't any use to try to do anything for me, just forget about me and let me go, because I was drinking Vitalis, and don't do that because it's got castor oil in it, but it's better than nothing. Aqua Velva is better, it's smooth. Aqua Velva means smooth. But that Vitalis stuff, if you can't get anything else, I reckon that's better than nothing, because I sure used to drink it when I couldn't get anything else. But since I was classified as hopeless, and then a little later on when something happened to me, I don't know what happened to me, but I had tried my own profession, and it was not any defect in them, it was in me. I wasn't ready to quit drinking liquor, and they'd take me in there, and as back in those days, they didn't know anything else to do, I was helplessly drunk, full of goofballs or something else, and they'd roll me in there, cycle water and roll me down there, and before I knew what was going to happen, when I first came to see, and I will forget one morning there, I woke up and I was going down the hall, and they had me strapped to the stretcher. I said, well, being a man of science and a prominent physician, I'm sure they realized they got me in the wrong part of this hospital, probably just a gastroenteritis, that means upset stomach, and my stomach was upset, I think, from that Vitalis I drank too much, and they're going to transfer me to the normal part of the hospital where the people are not crazy, and get me out of this like place, but instead of doing that, I found out that my people had signed a script permitting them to connect me up to the electricity, so instead of rolling me on down and out and letting me off and calling me Mr. Doctor and giving me a good room up on where the other people are with heart trouble, appendectomies, all those people, they rolled me in a little room, and they didn't even take me off of the same stretcher, they had me belted down, and they put a pillow, that was before they had acetylcholine, which keeps you from shaking, from convulsing too much, then they put a pillow under my knees, and one under my back, and I still wasn't quite sure, because I wasn't so well, what they were going to do, and then belted me down real tight, and then they had a great big Negro orderly, he was on my knees, and another one up here, and my fraternity
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brother of mine, who was the psychiatrist, I didn't go in there voluntarily, I was drunk, and my people sent me in there against my better judgment, I didn't have any judgment, so it was against judgment, and I looked up there and saw that man, he stuck something in my mouth, and I know now, because it was keeping from biting my tongue off, and then he put a little, like that, and connected me up to the current, and there I was again, and they rolled me, I don't remember anything else, because as usual in electro narcosis, which in its place, I'm quite sure is efficient and efficacious, but it is not for what I tell him, an alcoholic, because they, God knows they're used enough to light up the city of Vicksburg for the next hundred years on me, and plus giving me deep insulin shock, and none of it stopped me from drinking, or letting me drink normally, or letting me take tranquilizers normally, or letting me take Red Devils, Blue Buds, Yellow Jackets, or any other pills, any kind of other goofball normally, although it must, electricity must have done something to the convolutions of my brain, but it didn't touch the part of it that would have permitted me to drink normally, so they were trying to help me, and I tried to cooperate with them, but they would not give me a diagnosis of myself, they didn't even give me the pegs, they put in a little hole, you put the round peg in the round hole, and square peg in the square hole, triangular peg in the triangular hole, and they give you the book to look at with all the butterfly looking things in it, and then they tell you, they're supposed to tell you why I don't, did not drink normally, or take sleeping pills normally, or take tranquilizers normally, or indulge in any other psychic drug, and when you use the word alcohol, you might as well cover any other psychic drug, whether or not it be barbiturates, tranquilizers, or anything else, if you are taking it for your alcoholic trouble, being you are still a human being, and if you have any other sort of organic illness, hypertension, you have a perfect right to be treated with the proper medicine under the supervision of your doctor, and not medicate yourself, but at any rate, they never did give me a diagnosis, so I, of course, got tired of those psychiatrists, and I had about used them all up, so I had, I went to Atlanta, I found another one, and he was going to analyze me and all, everything else, and find out whether maybe I had been told that I am an only child, see, and that, they've got to have a cause of it, they spend so much time trying to find a cause of why you don't drink normally until you're half dead from drinking too much before they ever do anything about it, but at any rate, that's all they can do, and they are very sincere in their efforts, and their intentions are good, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and I think it is a lack of knowledge on the part, and I say this without reservation, of my profession. Many of them, of the older groups who have not, who are so busy, and that's why if we can establish rapport, our communications with them, it will help us, but now, it's a two-sided thing, and I admit that I'm speaking as an alcoholic now, that we in AA, we need the medical profession, but they need us too, they need us too, because the book says, now the younger ones coming out and some of the older, better ones have had enough sense to take a little time off and realize and learn a little something about alcoholism, there are still many, many doctors who have a closed mind about the thing, and they will tell you it's just a matter of willpower, just don't take but two, don't take but two. Well, the book does not attempt to treat it, the present day medical profession,
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as it does the clergy, since both of them have been almost total failures in the treatment of alcoholism, and that won't sound good to clergymen, or many doctors, but it's the truth, when we know that we have about 350,000 alcoholics who had reached rock bottom, who are sober now, and have been sober for from 1 to 25 years, but the book says refer them to it, and they will give you some information, frankly, an informed alcoholic, not reformed, but informed alcoholic, who is a member of AAE, and who has an interest in it, as you obviously have, unless you're here because somebody made you come, or because you didn't have anywhere else to go, is a better doctor, for another alcoholic, than the average doctor, and I say the average doctor, I'm not covering it for you now, because they don't know what to do about it, now we will assume, and you can, let's look at their side of it, they have a side of it too, see, we're just 6 million drunks in this country, 6 or 7, it goes, I can't, statistics, I don't like statistics, because I don't, I just know that a heap of drunks, the reason I don't like them really, is that, and I've treated 5,000, a little over 5,000 alcoholics under hospitalization, in the hospital of which I am medical director, and I'm on the other side of the desk now, and, but, I have, I have, below average intelligence, I would have had to have learned a little bit about alcoholics, having treated that many, so, but we have to look at the average doctors, and not, don't be too critical of them, and have a little understanding with him, because you can know how, we'll assume that the doctor, he just started and began private practice, and we would say that the Smith family, they write a good part of his income, there's a mom and a daddy and a grandmama and four or five children, he's treating them all, he's doing pretty well with them, and they pay him too, so he doesn't want to do anything to make them mad, so he says, everything's fine, then he, he is, we'll assume he's in general practice of medicine, which is, is a connecting link, as far as the medical profession is concerned, the first connecting link with the alcoholic, and then, and then his, his nice patient, the lady of the house, she called up an old Uncle Joe, he got, he's visiting, and he's awful sick, he's been drinking a little, but doctor, would you please come out here and, and, and see him, well, the doctor's tired, he's had a busy day, but he has to go out there, because he wants to keep on, he doesn't want to offend the people, and it's his duty to go, he took his Hippocratic oath to help the sick, so he goes out there, well, Uncle Joe, of course, just, just an alcoholic, who's drunk, and the only reason he told his sister, his aunt, or whoever she is, to call the doctor, because he, either, either he was too sick to get some liquor, he couldn't, didn't have any money to get wine, or they wouldn't give him any, so he's going to substitute, he figured the doctor would give him a shot with some pill to tide him over the next morning, then he could invigorate around and get a little, a little liquor, so the poor doctor, he examines him, it's obvious to the doctor that he's drunk, but it, it being a nice part of his practice, he doesn't, he said, now, he's had a little bit too much to drink, now, I'm going to leave, I'm going to leave these, these red capsules here, now, I'm going to put them on the bedside, on the table, now, now, I'm going to give you a shot, and also one of these little capsules, and if you should wake up, the rest of us are nervous, during the night, now, you, you can have one every four hours, until you feel better,
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then the poor doctor, he goes back home, and he, he goes to bed, and takes off his shoes with a sigh of relief, it's about a busy day, and his collections were good, and now, he looks forward to a good night's rest, about two o'clock, the phone rings, and the, and the, and the lady of the other house, she, she's very friendly, she says, Uncle Joe took all of those capsules, at one time, well, had he been an informed member of the medical profession, of course, he doesn't know what he had before, so, he's a little bit leery, so, he goes out there, either has a little too much to drink, and they pump Uncle Joe's stomach out, usually, it wouldn't have hurt him, just six of them wouldn't have hurt him, anyway, but, he isn't sure what he might have had prior to that, so, to be on the safe side, so, you can see why the medical profession shires away from treating alcoholics, unless they got them shut up somewhere, where they can't, can't do things like that, so, we have to, it would be well, if we could, if we could establish some report with them, and it would, it takes communication, and to let them know, to let the medical profession know, that in Alcoholics Anonymous, they have an ally, who would be not, would, would not attempt to practice medicine, but who would, who would help them with any problems that they had with themselves, or in their own family, or with their patients, with alcoholics, by informing them what can be done about it, and when it can be done, and how to do it, but, for some reason, they get disgusted with it, and then the next call, it makes, maybe he's grown a little, he, he's busy, or he's tired, or he's sick, or he's got an emergency, or he can't go out there and see Uncle Joe, and then, and then the other thing that establishes the, the antipathy with alcoholics is that, Doctor, he's sitting in his reception room, he's just as busy as he can be, the reception room's full of patients, by appointment, he's already behind, and all that he wants to alcoholics, he just comes busting right through the reception room, doesn't pay any attention to other patients, Doctor, I'm in terrible nerve shape, I've just got to have a shot in here, or something, I'm just about to shake to pieces, completely ignoring other people, I've done that myself, and, and the only reason he does it, is because he hasn't got any money to liquor store his clothes, or some reason he can't get any alcohol, and so you can see why that Doctor, he would be very happy if he could put a sign here on his door, alcoholics not treated, and, and that is, would be, you can see their side of it, but that's why if we can, if we can, and this is a little odd, if we can teach them a little bit about alcoholism, those who are not at present being taught in medical schools, and they are at present being taught in medical schools, what alcoholism is and what to do about it.
Now in the, in the advent, you, you can't, when, what can a doctor do, what can you do, when can you determine, say that a person is an alcoholic? In the earlier stages, you don't have to go down and get in a gutter as I did, and get shocked, and, and, and hypnotized, attempted hypnosis, and everything else. When you have a blackout, you are a mocked alcoholic. You know it takes some 15, 18 years. Speaking generally, some people go down one year, some take 25 years to reach what I call the absolute stage, but the mock stage is the second stage.
And when you have a blackout, you are an alcoholic, and there is no return to normal drinking, and there never will be. This is a progressive disease, just like pregnancy is, and you don't miscarry when you're an alcoholic either. So, so we, we, we would have to, so we would, we would have to assume, we would have to assume that, that that is, is the way the thing goes. And it, it is progressive, it's going right on down, and if we, you, or anybody else, and what is a blackout? I mean, I had a doctor out there, and I mean a prominent doctor who had, had, had gone through the same thing.
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He had been a guest at us, at the social festivities, and he waked up the next morning, and he calls in the garage. He was about 35, between 35 and 40, and he had, I, I'm referring now to the case history I took on him at, at, at the hospital of which I am medical director. And he, he had had this a little earlier. He waked up the next morning, his car was in the garage, his clothes were correctly arranged, his, his, his shoes were where they normally were supposed to be, he had on his pajamas, and nothing appeared wrong at all, but he didn't remember a thing.
Up, at a certain moment at the cocktail party, the party night, everything stopped, went black right there. So he assumed that he passed out, and somebody brought him, well anybody can pass out, a civilian, a normal drinker can pass out, you can hold him, pour enough liquor in him, it's a, it's a, it's a, has been used in years past as a surgical anesthetic. Anesthetic, you can give him enough, you can cut both legs off, he won't care, but, but that is unconsciousness, a coma.
But this blackout business, the doctor, he, these were friends of his, and he wanted to know how he got home, he just assumed somebody brought him home, because the last thing he remembered, he, he, he had a little old, a little old half a pint of either I.W. Harp or V.O. in the hostess's linen closet, and he tipped back there between her serving the cocktail and then took a gulp. And that, he remembered doing that. And he was hesitant about asking the hostess, the hostess, how he got home, because he didn't want to, he was afraid he might have pinched some of the guests in the wrong place, or said an off-color remark, and he did not want to, want to do that, or he didn't know whether they were mad with him or not.
So, so he, now he was a general surgeon who had no interest in obstetrics whatsoever, the only obstetrics he, he took was what he had to take in medical school, and, and we all have to take a certain amount of it and learn how to deliver babies, but he, his interest was in general surgery. And, and that was what his residency was in, and he had no interest in obstetrics. So, he shied away, but he was so curious, and he just happened to meet his host at that party on the street three or four days later, and the host said, Doc, my wife sure appreciates what you did the other night at that party.
Well, well, the doctor thought at first that he was being sarcastic, that he had committed some unpardonable sin, a crime at the party, but he soon thought that the man was sincere. He said, you know, that thing was getting dull, brother, everybody just sitting around looking at the ceiling, sighing, and we didn't know what to do. And you know, doctor, when you sat down on the rug in the, in the living room, and you took those pillars, those three pillars, and you showed us how a pregnant lady could deliver herself on a spaceship going to Mars, that showed it livened up that party.
And, and it, and it picked it up a great deal. And, and so the man wasn't, the man wasn't being sarcastic, and he was grateful. So, the doctor then knew that he had had amnesia, i.e. blackout, and once, so all he did at that time, well, I better slow down on my drinking a little bit, which he attempted to do, but as we all know, it is a progressive disease. Whether you are drinking or not, it's still a progressive disease. Whether you've been sober one year, 20 years, it's still a progressive disease.
And, so he, he, he attempted to slow down on it, but he finally ended up in the hospital of which I am medical director, and it is not a charity hospital. My patients there are either well-employed or self-employed, and I have had everything out there from space scientists to doctors, lawyers, you name it. Doctors, lawyers, you name it, I've had it, and sometimes they, because they are men of
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size and been to college and got, I had one with so many letters behind his name, he looked like a walking alphabet. And the space scientist I had, he, after we got him on his feet mentally and physically, he decided he had to go back to the Cape, but I still believe if he'd stayed a little longer that the missile, next missile wouldn't have went up wiggly wobbly, and let us teach him about, a little bit about AA and how to stay sober, because we are not a, we are not a drying out place, we are a hospital, and our business there is not to get them sober, it's to teach them how to stay sober, and the way that we do it, the way that we do it is by putting them in a station wagon and taking them to AA meetings, to the group to which I belong, or whatever their level in life is, having a member of the group come out and talk to them, plus whatever talking I can, I can't do, or the other members of the staff can, I can't do.
So now we, we know five years ago, when I took the thing over, most all of the diagnoses are on admission were acute alcoholism, now over 60% of them are combined with tranquilizers or barbiturates, and an alcoholic, an alcoholic, and I say this without reservation, who attempts to fool himself into believing that he is taking tranquilizers or barbiturates for the same reason, now, that he used to drink, for his anxiety, tension, or whatever reason he did drink, now I'm not referring to high blood pressure, if his doctor says if he doesn't do this he's going to die, I'm referring to if he is doing it, if he's treating his alcoholic tendencies with, or if his doctor's doing it and he won't, and I've had them lie to me, and maybe after this meeting we'll say I don't think, but just exactly like the doctor's saying, if he's an alcoholic I know he's alive, because why won't, why won't he follow the same pattern with any psychic drug that he did with alcohol, then if he does do that then he is not an alcoholic, if he is using it to, to treat his alcoholic tendencies.
Now, that is the truth, and all that an alcoholic is doing when he attempts to use barbiturates or tranquilizers, of which there's a 40 million, I even learned a new word the other day, one came out and, and, and it said it produced eunoia, e-u-o-n-i-a, and I said well what in the world is that, I have known it through AA many, many years, we use a different word, we use serenity, a peace of mind, it said eunoia, and they had it defined, if you take these pills four a day it produces a normal state of mental well-being. You take four a day, well I don't want a normal state, I want a little bit better normal, so if you take eight a day that'd be better, wouldn't it? So that, it still makes sense to me or any other alcoholic, if he is an alcoholic, that's why I cannot afford to take anything because if I do, if I do, now I don't mean if I break my leg, brother, you better give me some Demerol, don't come here saying you're going to let me lay here and suffer because I'm an alcoholic, because I'm still a human being and no two are alike, being an alcoholic doesn't keep you from being a thief or a liar or anything else, we're all human and no two of us are alike, this whole business of saying, I've used it many times, oh that's just my alcoholic way of thinking, I use it to goof off for laziness because I don't want to do something my wife wants me to do, because I forgot to do something that she told me to do, and that, no two alcoholics are alike except in one little way, they can't drink liquor, they can't drink liquor. So you can fool yourself if you want to into believing that if you are an alcoholic, there are plenty of men who rob banks who have been sober for five or ten years, so that doesn't have anything to do with your promiscuity or integrity, but I'm not referring to members of AA when I say this, as far as I know none of them have robbed any banks lately, but at any rate, that is the way the thing stands, you are building yourself, if you attempt to take pills, and all of you know what I mean when I say pills, any drug that has a psychic effect to me is just locked right together with alcohol,
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which is the same thing, only one of them is liquid, and one of them is a pill, a capsule, and they go, soon have alcohol, so it'll be in a pill, I assume, but at any rate, you are building yourself a happy little path right back to active alcoholism, and if you don't believe it, just keep on, just keep on. I have seen him who had been sober twenty-three years, twenty-three years, out of AA, but he got nervous and he got in my hold of a bottle of Middletown, Ecuador, whatever it was, and he started that, and he wasn't going to drink, no, not me, I'll never take another one, he on plain willpower, that boy did it, but you know why it messes you up, because it messes up your way of thinking, your way of thinking, the reason that you are sitting the way you are now as a member of AA, that's why it does it. So you leave, you're building yourself a little rosy path right back to alcoholism when you do that. My own descent into the abyss of alcoholism was completely involuntary. When I got out of the Navy in forty-six, I resumed practice in Augusta, Georgia, and in about two years I had attained about the average success in medicine and things began to get a little boring. Now why I am an alcoholic, I do not know the cause of alcoholism. I've been given fifty thousand different causes, and every cause that you give me I'll show you one who's got all of them, but yet he drinks normally. So I don't know the cause of it, and I'm referring to what I call an alcoholic who is not a psychopathic.
So when he is not drinking, as the book says, his average is above that, and I like that. It cost me seven dollars and fifty cents to get it. I read more than one page in that book, I read one half a page on each side. But at any rate, my descent into the complete abyss of alcoholism began, and I went all the way down. Now see, I was a low-bottom drunk, but you don't have to be, because if you have ever had a blackout, or if you know anybody who ever had a blackout, they are a marked alcoholic, and there's no return to normal drinking. I don't care what Yale or anybody else tells you, there is no return to normal drinking. If you have ever had a blackout, you will never again drink normally.
Your destiny reads three ways. You're either going to die drunk, you're going to be committed to an insane asylum, or you're going to have a happy sobriety by learning about this fellowship. You don't have four, five, sixteen ways, maybe like a diabetic, a cardiac, something else. You've got three ways to go. Three ways to go. Now you can pick, and it's up to you to pick it, too. You can pick any one of the three you want to pick. But I like this way better. Now, I got down in the gutter and lost everything I had. The way I got into the hospital, of which I am now medical director, my widowed mother, I borrowed $25 from her to make the down payment, and I worked the rest out while I was out there as a patient.
That's how I got in there. But when I walked in there, I was full of slow gin and Paragaric, and that's S-L-O-E, and that's the nastiest stuff. I'd rather drink Vitalis than slow gin. It's perfumy. I drank a pint of it and six ounces of Paragaric and went to this hospital. But I was still ready to quit because I was tired of it. I was drinking anything that had alcohol in it, taking any pill. I didn't look at the box, the pills, the sample set.
All it had to do was have on it, caution, maybe have it for me. That's all I was. Because I knew I'd get a lift, a kick out of the thing. I made the mistake one time to have some female sex hormone mixed up with the full thing, and I'm a son of a gun if I wasn't talking soprano right now about two weeks. When I thought of it after that, I did look. But I reached the bottom, all the way to the bottom. I am a low-bottom, sir. I lost everything
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I had, including my self-respect, the respect of the people who knew me, particularly the respect of my fellow physicians in the town of which I live, although about three years ago the medical journal, which had classified me as a hopeless alcoholic, accepted and printed an article of mine, Alcoholics Identified and Classified. It went to every doctor in the state of Georgia, plus many others. But that was the hopeless alcoholic. But in that article I told them where I got my sobriety from. I told them where I got it from. And you can call it, for the sake of the medical profession, you can call it group therapy, but you know it has a spiritual basis, because it's a three-way disease, mental, physical, and spiritual. And when I had reached the rock bottom, as I say, drinking anything and everything, stealing, getting in jail, being hypnotized, it didn't quite hypnotize me.
I got fancy pants and wanted to get out of town. This was a real high-class hospital up the way there in the town out of Augusta. I went in there and this poor little doctor, he had been up to the Meninger Institute and they taught him all about this analysis, hypnosis, all about that wonderful stuff. And see, if he could find out something hidden in my life, either my mama had shut me up in a closet or mistreated me, or either you don't have to be mistreated, you can be over-treated, either one. Or either I had been hypnotized by a promiscuous with my best friend's girl or something, and I had a guilt complex, and I didn't do no such a thing, because he ought to have been. Well, anyhow, that's the way it was, and I didn't have any guilt complex, and I didn't worry about it. The only thing worried me was how to learn to drink normally. So I went up there and the boy said, look Tom, and he was a young fellow who had just finished his, at that particular time, he was coming straight, he had just come into that hospital, and boy he knew all about it.
He could analyze, he, whoo, he could. They had already given up all his shop business on me, and they knew that was wasting electricity and so on. And he was going to hypnotize me, see, under the hope that he could, by the power of suggestion, fix it so that I would never again take a drink of liquor. Well, there was a most attractive young lady who was a friend of mine working in that hospital. She looked as much like Jane Russell as I have ever seen. She, whoo, she was pretty. And she had never, since he was dying and nobody in the hospital knew about this hypnosis, he just came from up here in Yankee land somewhere where they taught him about it and all that stuff. So they fixed it. He, she said, Tom, you mind if I sit in on this thing? I said, no, honey, I don't care if you sit in on it.
So he, the doctor, who is still a good friend of mine, but he still, he sends, now he sends me the alcoholics from his psychiatric hospital to my hospital. But he, he was going to hypnotize me. He was going to try it and his intentions were good, bless his heart. He meant well. See, he sat like he's sitting and I'm here. Well, behind me, the girl sat. I couldn't see her, but I could see him. The doctor said, he's going to hypnotize me. And, and, you know, the old routine, you hear nothing but the sound of my voice and, and your eyes are growing heavy. Now, hold that, you're right on point. That was hard. I wasn't any more hypnotized than a cow knows when Sunday comes. But he, I was so grateful for his attempted kindness. Hold that, John, it's like a band of steel you can hold. Man, that hurt. You ought to try it sometime. And I, I did it and then he let me let it down. And after he thought now I was under his power, nothing's going to harm you. You hear nothing but the sound of my voice. Nothing's going to harm you. And I'm, I was hypnotized, he said. And the girl was sitting right behind me, see, but he was hypnotizing me. Then he said, now on the table, right by, I was seated in a chair.
Now, on the table right on your right is a glass of whiskey, now, now, that glass is
[00:45:02]
red hot, now you reach out and touch it, it's red hot and it's full of good liquor, you reach out and touch it, and, and, of course, you and I still had enough sense to know if I touched something red hot it was going to burn me, so I did just what he wanted me to do, I reached out and I checked it, and, and he said, see, that was supposed to teach me that any time I ever touched anything with liquor and it was red hot, that was the power of hypnosis, so, then, but oddly or above the averagely, it said in the book, that isn't it, it said in the book, I was thinking all the time he was telling me that the glass was red hot, full of good liquor, I could take a straw and get the liquor out and not touch the glass, why would I have to go burn my four fingers to get the liquor out of the glass?
A heap of ways to do that, you don't have to touch the glass, so anyway, he, he decided that he had me then, boy, I wasn't going to ever take another drink, but it had burned my right hand, well, I got another hand anyway, but anyhow, to make asbestos gloves, anyhow, too, but anyway, that's beside the point, he, I played right along with him, because I didn't want to hurt his feelings, because he'd been taught by these good psychiatrists, but and that thing works for many, many things, now, I'm, I'm not throwing off all my profession, God knows they're fine in their place, but it wasn't, the reason it didn't help me was because I wasn't ready for help, that one of the, one of the best psychiatrists that I know of, if I'd known what he said many, many years ago, he told me to change my pattern, he said, which shoe you put on first, I said, I put on my right shoe first, he said, from now on, put on your left shoe first, I did that and I still couldn't drink liquor, if he had enough sense then to tell me, he might change my pattern of thought and go to A, that was what he actually meant, but anyway, when the man brought me back to, thought he brought me back to the world of reality out of my hypnosis, dear Lord, the gal was hypnotized back then, and to this date, that woman had never had another drink of liquor and she was a normal drink, whole little soul, whole little soul, she ain't got enough sense to realize she could take a straw and get it, she thinks, she burnt her hand if she tried to take a drink of liquor, well it took, well I walked into the hospital out there, after I'd gotten a gutter and got in jail, and I've been in jail, I've been everywhere that anybody ever could be, locked up, picked up, beat up, stomped and everything else, been in jail, been hospitalized, and I repeat, I was a low-bottom drunk who would, or did, steal money from his children to buy liquor, I don't say this with pride, and I remember it, but I remember it now without remorse, you know, you can use what happened as an asset, you don't have to use it as a liability, just like a diabetic should remember the last time he ate too much sugar, he went into a diabetic coma, he doesn't have to sit down and say, oh poor me, I've abused my mama, my wife, or something, so I use it as an asset, I allow myself five minutes a day to worry, and even now, I have times I have to worry about something to find to worry about, but at any rate, they took me out to the hospital, they walked my speed down to the bullpen, which is the admission building, they strapped me to the bed, the same old thing, and took my clothes away, searched me as if I, a man of science, would dare think of slipping some yellow jackets in with me, the very idea that I would do such a thing as that, I had them taped to the end of my inner thigh on a test tube and they didn't find them, but they put me in there, you know, and I was ready for help then, and they did alright, and finally, the man came down there who had been sober many many years, and I got through with all this, I got sewed up and they found my pills and took everything away from me, and I was shaky as I could be, I can still remember the first AA meeting I went to, because I had decided, I agreed with the medical profession, I was hopeless, I didn't know what to do or where to go, they took me to an AA meeting, and we in Augusta, we not rich like y'all, we got old hard seats, old hard metal seats,
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and I can tell you, show you the chair right now in the hill group where they took me, we take outpatients three times a week in a station wagon, we take them to the meeting, see, and sometimes you have to say, now when you get back, I'll give you a little dose of Parathyte, I know this is a program of attraction, a promotion of attraction rather than promotion, but anyway, AA anyway is better than nothing, but at any rate, I sat there in that chair, and Lord, I was sick as a buzzard, and, but to demand a speaker, when I drove up there, I saw all those Cadillacs and Lincolns and Bugts out there, and I had nothing, I didn't even have a, nothing, I had exactly nothing to ride in, I told you you had to borrow the money to get in the hospital, and I think I did have a tie, and I borrowed a tie to go to the meeting, I wanted to, since there was a doctor around Augusta, I didn't want to appear, I didn't know who might be there, and that might hurt me professionally, because I had no more patients left, because they didn't appreciate, the only reason I was drinking, so I could listen to them better, so I leaned against the wall and I listened, and the man got up there, and he had on a white hat, he had on a hat on a tie, and he had on a white shirt, and, and I recognized him as the owner of a big lumber company in Augusta, and he told a story that was worse than mine, and I said, dear Lord, if I'm hopeless, if he came back, and he was older too, then there's a chance for me, so one little seed was planted, one little seed, I wasn't sure, but one little seed of hope, I was leaving out the hopelessness, one little seed was planted, and it began to grow, and I began to go to meetings, go to meetings, go to meetings, go to meetings, go to meetings, and every time I went, I learned a little bit more, and I began to get serenity, and then I know about one drink, one drunk, 24-hour plan, this, that, and other, but the basis of all of it was the night I got on my knees and said, here it is, God, you take it, and that was humility, and until an alcoholic gets humility, he has absolutely nothing, he has nothing, until he gets humility, until he forgets that he is a man of science, an M.D., a doctor, who at one time had a five-room office suite, I got it back now, it was bigger than the one I had then, and you have to forget that you went through college and that you got a little money in the bank, you got a house, you have to forget that.
You have to forget that you have a degree or ever had a degree, because frankly, you could call that mental deficient, that M.D., and that's what it was right there. Whatever you got, you must forget it and get humility, at least I did, I have to say this about myself, you have to forget that you know all about physics, chemistry, or anything else that you are well thought of in the community, you don't have to get in the gutter like I did, if you are still self-employed or well-employed and have had a blackout, then you still go in one of those three ways I said, a happy sobriety, a die drunk or be committed to an insane asylum, and that is the truth.
But I kept going to AA, and they had something I wanted, and it was the true knowledge of humility and turning my will over to God, which I did and still do to the best of my ability, and I still ask for guidance, and prayer to me doesn't mean that I got to go in the corner and get on my knees, prayer means attempted communication with God, just thinking of God and asking for guidance. Prior to all this, I had never walked out of the operating room and picked up a knife in my life without saying, God guide my hand, but I wasn't thinking about time, I was thinking about the patient.
And then since this has come, and I have found AA and realized that I have to have humility and I have to be, to shy away from overconfidence and self-righteousness, and those are two dangerous things to me, overconfidence and self-righteousness. And I must forget how long I went to school or that I am a man of science or whatever kind of a man I am, and remember that I am only a helpless child, that God is an all
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loving, all powerful Father, and that through AA that God was a source and that AA was a channel which has brought me back from where I was to where I am. Thank you, Tom, for taking the medical profession and reducing it to drunk terminology so we alcoholics could understand. We are indeed fortunate to have men like you to come into Alcoholics Anonymous and you can be of much help. Many of us when we first come in don't find sobriety, but thank God that the doors in AA are on hinges, they swing both ways.
And we want to remember that Alcoholics Anonymous is all-inclusive and never exclusive, that we are all together here for the same cause. I'd like to say that I have had great fun here. We came here not only to, Lucille and I, to continue our treatment of alcoholism, but we came here to have fun. And believe you me, we have had a great time being here with you and sharing with you. This is a great thing, these conventions.
Words would be inadequate to try to express what I'm going to leave here with. I know that I leave here with a lot more than I came with. And I'll not say good-bye, we won't say good-bye, but we'll see you in Jackson. Jackson is a lucky city that will get the Mississippi State Convention next year. So instead of saying good-bye, we'll just say see you in Jackson next year. And shall we dispense with this wonderful convention in a customary manner by everyone arising and repeating our Lord's Prayer in unison?
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen.