Dr. Bob was also in the habit of calling almost everyone by a nickname. “He always called me Abercrombie,” said one of the early A.A.’s. Bill Wilson was Willie or, on state occasions presumably, Sir William. Alcoholics in general were U.D.’s, for “unknown drunks.” And according to Smitty, the good sister had her nickname as well—Ig. However, he was doubtful that his father ever had the nerve to use it in her presence.
As Sister Ignatia recalled, their first meeting seemed of no particular consequence. She knew nothing of Dr. Bob’s problem. “He just always seemed different from the rest,” she said. “He brought something with him when he came into a room. I never knew what it was. I just felt it.”
Another who thought Dr. R. H. Smith was different— “wonderfully different”—was Betty B., then a young student nurse at City Hospital. “He was known to us as Dr. R. H. S., because there were two other Smiths at City Hospital,” she said.
In 1934, Betty had no idea that Dr. R. H. S. was an alcoholic, although she was aware that his hands sometimes shook when he did a dressing and that his eyes were bloodshot. Only years later, when she herself came into the A.A. program, did she learn that City Hospital’s Dr. R. H. Smith and A.A.’s Dr. Bob were one and the same.
Yet the problem of alcoholism among staff members was
Some colleagues at City Hospital were unaware of Dr. Bob’s
drinking problem. Slowly, it became obvious.
not unknown even to student nurses. Betty heard that one doctor who had been chief of surgery was dismissed for this reason. She was told they allowed him to operate surreptitiously. And once, when she was on call, he wheeled someone into the operating room in the middle of the night.
Betty saw Dr. R. H. S. as neither pompous nor condescending at a time when student nurses were at the lowest level in a hospital hierarchy where doctors were demigods, at least in their own estimation.
“He didn’t ignore me or any other student,” she recalled. “When we’d step aside, as required, at an elevator or door so a doctor could precede us, we all knew Dr. R. H. S. would push us ahead, just as he’d stare above his glasses and growl, ‘Sit down, woman,’ when we automatically started to rise upon his entrance to the chart room. Most unusual of all, he’d thank us after we’d made rounds with him or helped change a dressing.
“His patients loved him. So did the nurses,” Betty said, remembering a time when, in her huge white apron and bib, she was still in awe of doctors and afraid of most of them. But not Dr. R. H. S. “I learned that beneath his abrupt and sometimes gruff exterior, he was kind and understanding, even a little shy.”
He called all student nurses “woman,” a term that made her feel a little less gauche, a bit more mature. She thinks he knew this and that was why he had chosen this incongruous term for student nurses. A select few, charge nurses he had known and respected a long time, were called “sugar.”
Betty remembered that he wore purple striped socks beneath his always-too-short surgical trousers. And his surgical cap, instead of being snugly fitted, was perched high above his ears like that of a rakish baker.
“He kept it simple before A.A., and the nurses who scrubbed for him loved him for it,” she said. “His surgical skills were admired by nurses and doctors alike, yet he used fewer instruments and other operating paraphernalia than any other surgeon.
“Over the years, I learned to admire and respect some doctors,” Betty said, “but I didn’t like many of them, because of their attitude. It is hard to find a doctor who is good professionally and is also a decent, fine man with humility. This is a very special sort of person, and Dr. Smith was that kind of man.
“When I became a surgical nurse, I learned that most surgeons are prima donnas. They have temper tantrums and they throw instruments. They are arrogant and can make it pretty rough, especially for a student nurse.
“If things started to go bad in an operation, Dr. R. H. S. would remain very calm. He made us all feel comfortable, and there was nothing hurried. His somewhat raspy voice would become soft and low. Orders were given quietly. The rougher the going, the more calm he became. This attitude infected us all.
“There was no screaming, no swearing. He was not snide, and he did not make off-color remarks to embarrass the students. Others would try to belittle us and would sometimes be really cruel. Dr. Smith was not that way, and because of that, we all loved him. I never heard an unkind thing said about Dr. Smith.”
Betty saw him as innately kind and possessed of an inner strength, and recalled his telling students that pain was the greatest leveler and that suffering patients should be treated with equal solicitude and compassion whether they were in charity wards or private rooms.
Above all, Betty remembers assisting Dr. Bob with a lumbar puncture, then dropping the specimen. Instead of reporting her, he merely said, “Well, we’ll just have to get some more.” And when her supervisor inquired why they were going through the complicated and tedious procedure again, Dr. Bob replied that he had “dropped the damn thing” before Betty could get hold of it, saving her from severe reprimand.
“I don’t know whether the supervisor believed that, but she couldn’t say he was lying,” Betty said. “So I just . . . well, I could have kissed the ground that man walked on.”
Betty also recalled that Dr. Bob could be blunt. “I got a call to the O.R. one Sunday afternoon. There was just Dr. Bob, an intern, the anesthetized patient, and me. Dr. Bob was not garrulous, and none of us were saying anything.
“The patient was turned over on his abdomen. Dr. Bob, who was a rectal surgeon, felt there was no point in prepping them there.
“The intern, who was a rather shy young man with his head in the clouds most of the time, was sort of leaning on the patient, using a hemostat to pull hairs out of the rectal area. It was as though he was plucking petals from a flower—‘She loves me, she loves me not.’
“I’ll always remember Dr. Bob saying, ‘Um, Doctor?’ And the intern said, ‘Yes, Dr. R. H.?’ And Dr. Bob said, ‘Just how the hell would you like someone pulling hairs out of your ass?’
“Yes, he was blunt. But there was nothing cross or phony about that man. I knew that long before I knew anything else about him. He was just a real guy.”
Lily, Dr. Bob’s receptionist-nurse, was equally devoted, according to Sue, who remembered her mother’s comment that Lily “had nothing but praise for him, but said she had a hard time getting him to tell who was indebted to him. He didn’t like to send out bills, and there were many people he didn’t charge at all.”
“That’s true,” agreed Smitty. “He did more charity work than he did for his regular patients. I remember how he’d say, ‘Well, I’ve got three operations this morning—two for the Lord and one for R. H.’ Not only that, but people would come into his office in desperate straits, and he would literally give them his last cent. He might only have 50 cents, but he’d give it to them.”
In 1933-34, of course, there were probably fewer and fewer bills to send out. Dr. Bob’s position at City Hospital became precarious, to say the least. There are some who say he was actually dismissed, but no record of dismissal has been found. It is likely that discussion of the matter was in a preliminary or “informal” stage when Bob stopped drinking— just in time. However, his surgical practice had dwindled, and he was supplementing his income through catch-as-catch-can general practice.
More light was thrown on this crucial period