Then I saw that the need was for a home visitor or a social worker to complete my diagnosis through more careful study of the patient's malady and economic situation, to carry out my treatment through organizing the resources of the community, the charity of the benevolent, the forces of different agencies which I had previously seen working so harmoniously together outside the hospital. Thus I established in 1905 a full-time, paid social worker at the Massachusetts General Hospital, to coöperate with me and the other physicians in the dispensary, first in deepening and broadening our comprehensions of the patients and so improving our diagnoses, and second in helping to meet their needs, economic, mental, or moral, either by her own efforts, or through calling to her aid the group of allies already organized in the city for the relief of the unfortunate wherever found. To bring the succor of these allies into the hospital and apply it to the needs of my patients as they were studied jointly by doctor and home visitor, was the hope of the new work which I established at that time. In the thirteen years which have elapsed since this period, about two hundred other hospitals in the United States have started social work, some of them employing forty or fifty paid social workers for the needs of a single hospital. Unpaid volunteer work has always been associated with that of the paid workers in the better hospitals. I should mention, in closing this chapter, three forms of medical-social work which had been undertaken previous to 1905, and which were more or less like the work which I have just described, though not identical with it: (1) The after-care of the patients discharged as cured or convalescent from English hospitals for the insane (1880). The visitors employed in this work followed the patients in their homes and reported back to the institution which they had left. Their labors were directed chiefly to the prevention of relapses through the continuation in the home of the advice and régime advised by the hospital physician and previously carried out in the institution. (2) The work of the Lady Almoners long existing in the English hospitals had begun about the time that I started medical-social-service work in America, to change its character so as to be more like the latter. Originally the purpose of the Lady Almoners was to investigate the finances of hospital patients in order to prevent the hospital from being imposed upon by persons who were able to pay something, but who represented themselves as destitute and therefore fit subjects for the aid of a charitable hospital. Gradually, however, the Lady Almoners had begun to be interested in the patients as well as in the hospital funds, and had begun to labor for the patients' benefit as well as for the hospital's. This brought them near to the idea of hospital social service as practised in this country since 1905.