For much of the first half of the twentieth century, people who wanted to quit drinking had a difficult time finding help. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and novelist Nan Robertson, who fought and won her own battle with alcoholism, describes the few dismal options available to alcoholics of that period to aid them in dealing with their problem:

There were only two ways for a drunk to go if the family wouldn't take care of him or he couldn't afford a "drink cure" in a fancy sanitarium--to the drunk tank in jail or to the insane asylum. In those days alcoholics who wound up in [mental institutions] were locked in wards with criminal psychopaths and those afflicted with senile dementia. Nobody knew what else to do with them. Until the American Medical Association officially recognized alcoholism as a disease during the...