Fom Bill Wigmore's 

Austin Recovery

"William Duncan 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 (Silkworth) 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. 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 (Bill's) 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."

Excerpted from Bill Wigmore's  Austin Recovery