A REAL HIGHER POWER –
March 4, 2023 – At the time, alcoholism was not treated as a medical condition.
The patient had been brought to her by Dr. Bob Smith, a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous who was working at St. Thomas at the time.
According to Dr. Caroline Healy of the EPIC Museum in Dublin, Sr. Ignatia found some private space for the patient in a storage room. He was later visited by members of what would become known as Alcoholics Anonymous.
Together, Sr. Ignatia and Dr. Smith went on to establish one of the world’s first hospital-based programs for alcoholism – an eight-bed ward where thousands of people took their first steps toward recovery. Sr. Ignatia and Smith worked together over the course of several years to admit alcoholic patients to the hospital and the Irish nun introduced several ideas that later became synonymous with AA, including the use of tokens to mark sobriety milestone…
