William Duncan Silkworth
American medical doctor and specialist in the treatment of
alcoholism. He was Director of the Towns Hospital in New York City in the 1930s, during which time
Bill Wilson, a future co-founder of the self-help movement
Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.), was admitted on three separate occasions for alcoholism. Silkworth had a profound influence on Wilson and encouraged him to realize that alcoholism was more than just an issue of moral weakness. He introduced Wilson to the idea that alcoholism had a pathological disease-like basis.