Dr. Bob Smith takes his last drink, then walks into surgery
Robert Holbrook Smith had checked himself into hospitals and sanitariums more than a dozen times and still could not stop drinking. The Akron, Ohio, surgeon met Bill Wilson — a New York businessman who had found sobriety through the Oxford Group — on May 12, 1935, and the two spent hours talking in a way that neither a doctor nor a clergyman had managed to reach Smith before. Smith relapsed once, at a medical convention in Atlantic City, but on June 10, 1935, he took what became his last drink and walked into surgery. That date is now AA's founding day, still marked every June in Akron.
AA began in an Akron living room and spread through a single Saturday Evening Post article in 1941 that tripled its membership in a year. By 2021, 73 percent of AA's nearly two million members lived in the United States and Canada. The organization reshaped how American medicine, law, and culture understand addiction — moving alcoholism from a moral failing to a treatable condition — and seeded every major twelve-step program that followed.
QWhy did Dr. Bob's last drink actually happen on the morning of his surgery — and what did he take?
Smith had already committed to performing an operation on June 10, 1935, before he and Wilson had fully reckoned with the relapse at Atlantic City. He was, by his own account, in no condition to operate. Wilson and Anne agreed he should go through with the surgery rather than cancel on a patient. Smith took a single bottle of beer before leaving the house — enough, he said, to steady his hands and get through the procedure. He walked out of that operating room and never drank again. The date is now AA's founding anniversary, observed every year in Akron as Founders Day, with tours of the historical sites and thousands of members sharing recovery stories.
QHow did a Swiss psychiatrist's conversation with a Rhode Island socialite indirectly help create AA?
Rowland Hazard, a wealthy Rhode Islander, sought treatment from Carl Jung in Zurich in the early 1930s. Jung told him frankly that medicine had nothing more to offer — his only hope might be a spiritual conversion within a religious community. Hazard joined the Oxford Group, achieved sobriety, and carried that message to Ebby Thacher, an old drinking companion of Bill Wilson's. Thacher brought the Oxford Group's approach to Wilson, who found sobriety and eventually carried it to Dr. Bob in Akron. Jung never knew the chain he had set in motion. Wilson wrote to Jung near the end of the psychiatrist's life to tell him; Jung wrote back that he recognized the link.
QWho invented the sobriety coin tradition in AA, and what were they handing out first?
The tradition traces to Sister Ignatia, a Catholic nun who worked alongside Dr. Bob at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron helping alcoholic patients. When patients were discharged, she pressed a small medal — a Sacred Heart medallion — into their hands as a tangible reminder not to drink. The gesture was informal, personal, and entirely her own idea. It gradually became the coin system AA uses today, with different colored chips marking sobriety milestones from twenty-four hours to multiple decades. Sister Ignatia is estimated to have helped more than 15,000 patients during her years in Akron and later in Cleveland, making her one of the most consequential figures in early AA history despite holding no formal role in the organization.
