Dr. Bob is a friendly and very openly courteous man despite his supposed relation to the Foundation, who are infamously known for their secretive nature and somewhat detached emotions. He enjoys explaining the many mysteries of the SCP Foundation and the various entities/objects within their custody. Very rarely does Dr. Bob break his professional, clinical tone in his presentations. Dr. Bob was intensely interested in the efficacy of prayer, and his library bespeaks this interest. Among his many books about the subject of prayer were Glenn Clark’s The Soul’s Sincere Desire, Starr Daily’s Recovery, Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Charles and Cora Filmore’s Teach Us to Pray, Emmet Fox’s Getting Results by Prayer, Gerald Heard’s A Preface to Prayer, Frank Laubach’s Prayer (Mightiest Force in the World), Charles M. Layman’s A Primer of Prayer, William R. Parker’s Prayer Can Change Your Life, and F. L. Rawson’s The Nature of True Prayer. While Bob was pursuing his practice visits, Sue Ibbotson was setting up “Specialty Liaison Groups” for all the major cancers. For example, there were concerns about the breast service at the time in Fife. Sue set up a breast group and Bob, significantly a GP and not a breast surgeon himself, became the group’s Chair. He recalls how, at the first meeting, he discovered that the breast surgeons from the two Fife hospitals hadn’t even met before, so he was able to introduce them.

Though the two years as intern at City were hectic, Dr. Bob had time to learn much from the older men who were glad to share their knowledge with him. He began to perfect his own skills so that he might be- come a specialist, a surgeon. When his two years of internship were over he opened an office in The Second National Bank Building, in Akron. This was in 1912. His offices were in the same building until he retired from practice in 1948. Dr. Bob has never fully shown or revealed his face, but he appears to be a tall pale Caucasian male dressed in brown work pants and a red sweater with a white lab coat sporting a bright orange name tag with his name on it. Around that time there was agreement to re-jig the Scottish Cancer Group, and the Chairman’s position was advertised internally through the three Scottish Cancer Networks.” Bill, Bob, and many early A.A.’s read Professor William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (cited by name in A.A.’s Big Book) and Dr. Carl Gustav Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Jung was later called a “founder” of A.A. as was William James. Like his fellow SCP animator Detective Void, Dr. Bob is theorized to be a human of possible anomalous origins due to interacting with many other SCPs. Some of these would normally be fatal for any other human being but the doctor merely brushes them off.Throughout Bill Wilson’s leadership in A.A., he talked much of his famous “hot flash” experience. He pointed to William James’s book The Varieties of Religious Experience as a validation of what had occurred to him. It is fair to say that neither Dr. Bob nor most AAs ever had anything like Bill’s experience. But their reading did define for them what it meant to be converted, to have a conversion experience, to experience the presence of God, and so on. These are mentioned in A.A. histories. And they were mentioned in pamphlets and bulletins put out by A.A. offices and groups. They were also mentioned by many of the surviving families and pioneers the author interviewed. In February 2005, Bob was interviewed and selected for the position of Chairman of the Group. His first year as Chairman was “a really good year”. He learned to understand the system and work with the Scottish Executive. Bob particularly emphasises the collaboration with patient representatives: His first discovery in his search for the facts of life on the campus was that joining the boys for a brew seemed to make up the greater part of after-class recreation. From Dr. Bob’s point of view it was the major extra-curricular activity. It had long been evident that whatever Rob did, he did well. He became a leader in the sport. He drank for the sheer fun of it and suffered little or no ill- effects. His years at Dartmouth were spent doing exactly what he wanted to do with little thought of the wishes or feelings of others—a state of mind which became more and more pre- dominant as the years passed. Rob graduated in 1902 …“summa cum laude” in the eyes of the drinking fraternity. The dean had a somewhat lower estimate. Bob’s Macmillan funding gave him four sessions a week of protected time and he retained the Macmillan tag after the Macmillan funding ceased. His role as Lead GP for Cancer continued until he retired, while the administrator, nurse and lead clinician are all still there today.

In 1935 Dr. Bob met Bill Wilson, a New York businessman and entrepreneur who was struggling with his own alcoholism. The two immediately became close friends, with Bill showing Dr. Bob how he, with spiritual help, was finally able to recover from the effects of alcoholism. There was no shortage of specific information in early A.A. as to what the message was, how to carry it, and what to do with the newcomer. If they simply looked to the Book of Acts and the commentaries about it, they were well supplied. Anne Smith so suggested. Now he held a Dartmouth diploma, but the desire to become a medical doctor was still with him. His mother, who had never approved of this career for her son, hadn’t altered her views. For the next two years he worked for a large scale company; then he went to Montreal where he labored at selling railway supplies, and heavy hardware. He left Montreal and went to Filene’s store in Boston. What success attended his efforts, as well as the efforts of the sisters and all who worked with the many patients who passed through that ward, is now a matter of AA history. It will ever remain a monument to the memory of R. H. S., M. D. — and Dr. Bob, the man. All through this period he was drinking as much as purse allowed, still without getting into any serious trouble. But he wasn’t making any headway either. He still wanted to be a doctor. It was time he was about it. He quit his job at the store and that Fall entered the University of Michigan as a pre-medical student. Again he was free of all restraint. Earnestly, he got down to the serious business of drinking as much as he could and still make it to class in the morning. His famous capacity for beer followed him to the Michigan campus. He was elected to member- ship in the drinking fraternity. Once again he displayed the wonders of his “patent throat” before his gaping brothers.It then happened that Dr. Bob and Anne were thrown in with a crowd of people who attracted Dr. Bob because of their poise, health and happiness. These people spoke of their problems without embarrassment, a thing he could never do. They all seemed very much at ease. Above all, they seemed happy. They were members of the Oxford Group. Self-conscious, ill at ease most of the time, his health nearing the breaking point, Dr. Bob was thoroughly miserable. He sensed that these newfound friends had something that he did not have. He felt that he could profit from them. While Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith thoroughly appreciated the spirit of personal gratitude that usually prompted such superlatives, he never took them seriously as applicable to himself. He rose up to tell with all humility the simple story of an alcoholic’s return to sobriety. Dr. Bob seldom called upon his vast experience with others. He simply repeated in different ways the story of one man’s great return. And that was his own. Like most SCP channels out there, Dr. Bob presents all SCPs in a direct and informative way. However, instead of simply presenting the SCPs details right away, he presents a fictional scenario where that the SCP in question is a part of, often in a horrific and tragic way. After this, the facts of the SCP are presented. Bob frequently spoke of God as a God of love. He summarized A.A.’s ideas as being, in their essence, “love and service.” Bob Grant’s life is an extraordinary example of how a person who has survived cancer and lived for years with the late effects of radiotherapy has succeeded in becoming a national influence on the Scottish cancer scene. Since the early 1990s, he has held various advisory and lead positions and worked continuously with Macmillan Cancer Support. Previously he was Chair of the Scottish Cancer Group and also was part of an NCRI group looking at cancer in teenage and young people. He has drawn on the health problems he himself encountered from his school days onwards into a strong personal motivation to improve patient care. He currently chairs the Scottish Health department group reviewing the Scottish Cancer Referral Guidelines. He acts as a medical adviser in Scotland to the Teenage Cancer Trust. In September 2012 he took on the chair of the new Associate Fund raising Board for Maggie’s Fife.

Bob emphasises the generous support given to him during his period of chronic illness from 1988 onwards by his partners and other staff members in the practice in Markinch, Fife: Dr. Bob’s daughter told the author that her father frequently stayed up late into the night studying the Bible (Dr. Bob’s Library, p. 13). Anne Smith recommended reading at least one book on the life of Christ a year for a while, commenting that even more would be better. Dr. Bob’s daughter confirmed that Dr. Bob read these. They included: Jesus of Nazareth: A Biography by George A. Barton, The Life of Jesus Christ by The Rev. James Stalker, Studies of the Man Christ Jesus by Robert E. Speer, The Jesus of History by T. R. Glover, The Manhood of the Meanwhile, towards the end of 2003, around the around the time his stump was beginning to give him problems, Bob’s permanent health insurance company had suggested a review of his health. Three years had passed since he had last consulted in earnest, and this was during a period of rapid change. The upshot was that, after re-registering with the GMC, by July 2004 Bob was ready to join a practice in Kirkcaldy, Fife as a salaried GP on a part-time basis.

In Edinburgh, Bob was in a ward with other patients with advanced disease, and yet he was never told he had cancer – his mother was anxious to keep the knowledge from him. (Years later, Bob was to discover from reading his primary care notes that there was “no great expectation of survival” at the time.) Dr. Bob and everyone that knew him well in the early A.A. days spoke of the immense amount of reading he did. He read the Bible through three times and studied it daily. As he put it: