charles b towns
habits that handicap
Arno Press; ASIN: 0405136196;
1981 reprint
Charles Towns alcohol articles
Charles_b_towns_habits_tha_handicap.pdf
An early printing of HABITS THAT HANDICAP: THE MENACE OF OPIUM, ALCOHOL, AND TOBACCO, AND THE REMEDY by Colonel Charles B. Towns. As the owner and founder of Towns Hospital in New York City, Towns was a pioneer in addiction therapy and treatment and figured in the early history of Alcoholics Anonymous. Many Twelve Step authorities maintain that Bill Wilson started his recovery at Towns’ hospital. In fact, Bill W's medical mentor, Dr. William Duncan Silkworth (little doctor who loved drunks, according to Bill) was director of Towns Hospital in New York where Bill had several times sought help. It was Towns who apparently, along with the Hospital’s other founder, Dr. Sam Lambert, asked Bill W. to work in his hospital as a lay therapist and it was Towns who loaned $2,500 to help Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book get published. This copy of HABITS THAT HANDICAP is an early edition published by The Century Company, New York, in 1917 (first published in 1915). It is a plain brown hardcover (a tad soiled on the covers) with gilt-pressed titles on the spine, firmly bound, xiv + 290 pages. It is not ex-library, and there are no ownership names in it, except that on the front pastedown there is the stamp of Charles B. Town Hospital that has been partially scratched out. Besides being a tireless advocate for therapies and treatments for the alcoholic and drug abuser, Towns was responsible for promoting watershed legislation that held doctors more accountable for dissemination of prescription drugs. Known as the Boylan Act and passed by the New York Legislature in 1914, the law, for the first time, regulated the terms and conditions under which doctors could prescribe drugs. The prescription practices it put in place still largely hold true today. HABITS THAT HANDICAP is full of candid discussions about drug abuse that can be regarded as progressive even by today’s standards. Towns’ book presents in detail the dangers of hypodermic injection and the syringe, patent drugs that are habit-forming, the prevalence of drug addiction among doctors, nurses and pharmacists, treatment methods (reduction method, sanitarium, etc.), the psychology of drug abuse, etc. Towns recognized how unscientific the attitude toward and treatment of alcoholism were and believed strongly “complete mental change must precede reform”, the pricincipal that later became the basis for the Twelve Steps. Towns was a voice in the medical wilderness in writing about the addictive nature of tobacco and its “injuriousness” and wrote quite plainly (and presciently) “the full effect of the tobacco habit is not yet apparent.” This book also details his early advocacy for education and instruction as preventive tools to drug addiction and alcoholism. The book has a chapter wherein Towns classifies the habit-forming drugs specifically: heroin, cocaine, opium, morphine, hypnotics, sleeping powders, coal-tar products, etc. A fascinating book, in that so much is (sadly) still relevant almost 100 year later