Hello and welcome to Sobercast, where we provide A.A. Speaker meetings and workshops in podcast format.

We're an ad-free podcast, and if you enjoy listening, please help us be self-supporting by visiting Sobercast.com, look for the link, and drop a dollar or two into our virtual

basket. We hope you enjoyed the podcast. Have a great day. My name is Diz. As I told you last night,

I'm one of the self-appointed historians in Alcoholics Anonymous. And what we're going to do

this morning is a doctor's opinion,

which is this man right here,

in case you haven't seen pictures of him.

He really was kind of called a medical saint by members of A.A. in New York.

And when the first group conscience of alcoholics was held, it was held Nacron, Ohio in

1937 by about 22 or 23 people, and they finally realized they had something good going,

but they also knew that if they held it to themselves and tried to pass it on verbally,

it was going to lose a lot of its importance.

So they had a vote, and they took a vote on whether they was going to have a book or not.

And even among all the skeptics and everything else, they voted by two votes to have a book.

And that the book, because Bill Wilson had more knowledge in anybody else about this disease,

they asked Bill to write the book.

And so Bill dictated this book to his first secretary, Ruth Hock, who typed it up,

double-spaced it on paper, you know, with the old paper in secretary, Ruth Hock, who typed it up, double spaced it on paper,

with the old paper in between, so she had copies, you know, what that used to be like?

Nobody knows that except Bob and I.

And the first two chapters he wrote was Bill's story, and there is a solution.

And so he wanted to find out whether the information in these two chapters had any importance

...