Richard C. (Richard Clarke) Cabot - Social Work; Essays on the Meeting Ground of Doctor and Social Worker

Social Work; Essays on the Meeting Ground of Doctor and Social Worker — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Social Work; Essays on the Meeting Ground of Doctor and Social Worker" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...36

Books by Richard C. Cabot

Published by

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

---

A LAYMAN'S HANDBOOK OF MEDICINE. With Special Reference to Social Workers.

WHAT MEN LIVE BY.

SOCIAL WORK. Essays on the Meeting-Ground of Doctor and Social Worker.

---

SOCIAL WORK

---

SOCIAL WORK

ESSAYS ON THE MEETING-GROUND
OF DOCTOR AND SOCIAL WORKER

BY

RICHARD C. CABOT, M.D.

logo

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1919

---

COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY RICHARD C. CABOT

All Rights Reserved

---

TO
MARY E. RICHMOND
WHOSE ILLUMINATING BOOK ON "SOCIAL DIAGNOSIS"
MARKS AN EPOCH IN THE DEVELOPMENT
OF SOCIAL WORK

---

PREFACE

Most writers who disclaim thoroughness are prone to describe their work as an outline, a sketch, or an introduction. But the chapters of this book are more like spot-lights intended to make a few points clear and leaving many associated topics wholly in the dark. Possibly such isolated glimpses may serve better than a clear outline to suggest the interest of the whole topic. At any rate, that is my hope.

Part of the same material has been used in lectures given at the Sorbonne in the early months of 1918 and published by Crs & Cie. under the title of Essais de Mdecine Sociale.

---

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL ASSISTANCE IN MEDICAL WORK
Part I : Medical-Social Diagnosis
I.	THE MEDICAL STANDING, DUTIES, AND EQUIPMENT OF THE SOCIAL ASSISTANT
II.	HISTORY-TAKING BY THE SOCIAL ASSISTANT
III.	ECONOMIC INVESTIGATION BY THE SOCIAL ASSISTANT
IV.	MENTAL INVESTIGATION BY THE SOCIAL ASSISTANT
V.	MENTAL INVESTIGATION BY THE SOCIAL ASSISTANT, CONTINUED
VI.	THE SOCIAL WORKER'S INVESTIGATION OF FATIGUE, REST, AND INDUSTRIAL DISEASE
VII.	THE SOCIAL WORKER'S BEST ALLYNATURE'S CURE OF DISEASE
Part II : Social Treatment
VIII.	SAMPLES OF SOCIAL THERAPEUTICS
IX.	THE MOTIVE OF SOCIAL WORK

---

INTRODUCTION HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL ASSISTANCE IN MEDICAL WORK

I

The profession of the social worker, which is the subject of this book, has developed in the United States mostly within the past twenty-five years. Probably ten thousand persons are now so employed. It is known by various titlessocial worker, school nurse, home and school visitor, welfare worker, hospital social worker, probation officervarying according to the particular institutionthe hospital, the court, the factory, the schoolfrom which it has developed. But although the use of these visitors has been developed independently by each institution, and largely without consciousness of what was going on in the others, yet the same fundamental motive power has been at work in each case. Because this is so, we shall do well, at the outset of our study of home visiting, to get a clear conception of the common trunk out of which various types of home visitor have come like branches.

Why has such an army of new assistants been called into existence? For this reason: In the school, in the court, in the hospital, in the factory, it has become more and more clear, in the last quarter of a century, that we are dealing with people in masses so great that the individual is lost sight of. The individual becomes reduced to a type, a case, a specimen of a class. These group features, this type of character, of course the individual possesses. He must be paid as "a hand," he must be enrolled in a school as "a pupil," admitted to the dispensary as "a patient," summoned before the court as "a prisoner." But in this necessary process of grouping there is always danger of dehumanization. There is always danger that the individual traits, which admittedly must be appreciated if we are to treat the individual according to his deserts, or to get the most out of him, will be lost sight of. We shall fail to make the necessary distinction between A and B.

It is the recognition of this danger which has led, in the institutions which I have mentioned, to the institution of the social worker. Above all of her duties it is the function of the social worker to discover and to provide for those individual needs which are otherwise in danger of being lost sight of. How are these needs found? In schools, hospitals, factories, courts, and in the home visiting carried out in connection with them, one can discern the two great branches of work which in the medical sphere we call diagnosis and treatment.

Thus, in the school, it is for the individualization of educational diagnosis and of educational treatment that the home visitor exists. The educational authorities become aware that they need to understand certain children or all the children of a group more in detaileach child's needs, difficulties, sources of retardation. This educational diagnosis is made possible through the home visitor's study of the child in the home and out of school hours. There follows a greater individualization of educational treatment. The teacher is enabled, through the reports of the home visitor, to fit his educational resources more accurately to the particular needs of the scholar, so that they will do the most good.

In the juvenile courts the judge needs to understand more in detail the child's individual characteristics, the circumstances, the temptations, which preceded and accompanied the commission of the offence which now brings the culprit before him. This is penological diagnosis, and the court visitor or probation officer, sometimes simply called the social worker, makes a study of the law-breaker in his home and in relation to all the influences, physical or moral, which may help to explain the commission of the particular offence which has brought him into trouble. All this leads to the greater precision of penological treatment. Understanding more in detail why this particular boy has committed this particular theft, how he differs from other boys who have stolen, the judge is much more likely to choose wisely those measures of treatment which in the long run will do most to restablish the individual as a healthy member of society.

In the factory the object of the employer in setting a home visitor or welfare worker at work is to create the maximum of satisfaction and good spirit among his employees, whereby each will do his best work and be as little likely as possible to change his employment. In the old days, when shops were small and the employer could know his employees personally, no intermediary such as a home visitor was necessary. The employer could keep human touch with his men. He could know not merely the amount of work done by each man, but something of the circumstances of his life, something of his personality, his adventures and misfortunes, so that help could be extended to him from time to time when special need occurred. It is only when the workshop has grown to the enormous size familiar in modern industrial plants that this relation of employer and employee has to be supplemented through the mediating offices of the home visitor.

It is this same process of evolution, the same heaping-up of groups till finally they become unmanageable, which has led to the employment of the social worker in other institutions. It is because the schoolmaster must teach so many that he can no longer know his pupils and their families individually that he has to employ the home visitor to keep him better in touch with them. It is because the judge tries so many prisoners that he cannot grasp and pursue all the detailed characteristics of those who come before him for judgment that he is compelled to get them at second-hand from a home visitor.

Next page

1234567...36

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Social Work; Essays on the Meeting Ground of Doctor and Social Worker»

Look at similar books to Social Work; Essays on the Meeting Ground of Doctor and Social Worker. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Huw Beynon

Patterns of Social Inequality: Essays for Richard Brown

Richard Hugman

Social Development in Social Work

Richard Hugman

Understanding International Social Work

Richard Selzer

Letters to a Young Doctor

Richard Swedberg

The Art of Social Theory

Richard Gillespie

Rethinking Social Democracy in Western Europe

Richard J. Estes Professor Of Social Work University Of

Advances in Well-Being: Toward a Better World

Richard P. Kollen

The Patriot Parson of Lexington, Massachusetts: Reverend Jonas Clarke and the American Revolution

Clarke Karen

Social Policy for Social Work: Placing Social Work in its Wider Context

Richard T. Stanley

Disco Days: A Social History of the 1970’s

Richard Clarke

Against All Enemies: Inside Americas War on Terror

Richard A. Clarke

Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It

Discussion, reviews of the book Social Work; Essays on the Meeting Ground of Doctor and Social Worker and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.