Bob Smith (doctor)
American physician and surgeon (1879–1950)
Robert Holbrook Smith (August 8, 1879 – November 16, 1950), also known as Dr. Bob, was an American physician and surgeon who cofounded Alcoholics Anonymous with Bill Wilson (more commonly known as Bill W.).
Family and early life
Smith was born and raised in St. Johnsbury, Vermont to Susan A. (Holbrook) and Walter Perrin Smith. His parents took him to religious services four times a week, and in response he determined he would never attend religious services when he grew up. He graduated from St Johnsbury Academy in 1898, having met his future wife Anne Robinson Ripley at a dance there.
Education, marriage, work, and alcoholism
Smith began drinking while attending Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Early on he noticed that he could recover from drinking bouts quicker and easier than his classmates and that he never had headaches, which caused him to believe he was an alcoholic from the time he began drinking. Smith was a member of Kappa Pi Kappa fraternity at Dartmouth. After graduation in 1902, he worked for three years selling hardware in Boston, Chicago, and Montreal and continued drinking heavily.
“Bob Smith (doctor)” enters the record as american physician and surgeon (1879–1950). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Smith, doctor and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1346306. VIAF identifies the subject as 42403998. The Library of Congress control number is n80112665. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1879, 1950, 1898 and 1902.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bob Smith (doctor)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.