Social Work; Essays on the Meeting Ground of Doctor and Social WorkerCabot, Richard C. (Richard Clarke)
Science
Social Work; Essays on the Meeting Ground of Doctor and Social Worker
Cabot, Richard C. (Richard Clarke)
Charities, Medical; Friendly visiting; Medical social work -- United States; Social service
2. _Money_ is, I suppose, on the whole, the thing we are asked for
directly or indirectly most often in social work. If we are not doing
direct medical work, if we are not giving a direct medical relief or
trying to, we are more than likely to be asked for help in the way of
money, clothes, food, or rent. Surely no one works long in social work
who does not find the right place to give money. But I have to go back
to the figure already used, the parallelism of money and morphine. A
person comes to us with pain and begs for money or its
equivalent--direct, immediate relief. What makes us hesitate in the one
case is the same that makes us hesitate in the other. We may relieve,
yes; but have we constructed? In the long run we must both construct and
give, else our giving may be useless or harmful.
When can we give money without doing harm?
In a general way, when it is not going to lead to the repetition of the
same demand. When are we perfectly sure that we may safely give
morphine? In gall-stone colic. For it may be weeks, months, years,
perhaps, before there will be another such attack of colic. We give
morphine once only. The person gets over the attack, and does not want
morphine again for months or years. But if the patient's pain is chronic
or likely to recur soon and frequently, it is cruel to give morphine,
because soon the patient will have all that pain again, and more--_the
pain which is produced by morphine_ after it has been taken a little
while. We never can tell that the pain suffered is not wholly due to
morphine. So the person's trouble after we have given money may be due
to the money itself, ill used. We should be able to say, after a
careful, though not care-worn study of the case, that we know the
patient's pecuniary need is not going to recur, because we are not
dealing with a chronic difficulty like extravagance or alcoholism, which
will recur and cannot be checked by money.
3. On the whole, the safest form of giving that I know, that which is
surest to perpetuate itself, to be planted like a seed and go on
without our having to stand by it, is giving _information_--a
cold-sounding thing, but sometimes very useful. One difference between
the social worker and the person for whom she works ought to be that the
social worker has had more education, more freedom, more friends, more
opportunity to look around the world and see resources. Hence, when, for
instance, she comes to find a job for a man, the social worker, because
of the perfectly undeserved blessings that she happens to have, ought to
be in a position to give information that is of value.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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