I said above that the social worker should try to find out what disease, how much disease, and why this disease is present. The answers to these three questions cannot be kept separate. If one knows how much importance to attribute to a given symptom and whether it is as bad as it seems or worse than it seems in the dispensary interview, one may be steered straight to a correct diagnosis. To know _how much_ disease may thus mean knowing _what_ disease is present. Furthermore, the understanding of these questions, even though it be only partial and unsatisfactory, leads us a considerable distance towards understanding why the disease has arisen. The search for sources for contagion is an example of a search for a _why_ in disease. The search for psychical factors--groundless fears, misleading newspaper advertisements, distracting rumors--all this is also a search for the cause as well as for the nature of disease. The social worker's investigations into the cause of disease may perhaps be still further exemplified. I once sent a social worker to my patient's home with the request that she try to find out what I had failed to find out, namely, why a young girl could not sleep. Physical examination of the girl had revealed no cause; the exploration of such parts of her mind as she would reveal to me had thrown no light upon the trouble. I was at a loss and asked for help through the more intimate knowledge of the patient sometimes to be gained through a social worker's studies. Such a search might easily have been fruitless--it often has been fruitless in my own experience. But in this case it was almost comically swift in reaching its goal. The visitor found that this girl was sleeping with two other girls of about her own age, in a bed hardly more than a metre wide. It needed only that she should acquire a separate bed for herself, which she was able to do without any financial assistance. She then regained her power to sleep. How often have such cases been treated with drugs or perhaps with more complicated physio-therapeutic or psycho-therapeutic procedures, when some simple fact like the size of the bed, the temperature of the sleeping-room, or the mental activities of the evening immediately preceding bedtime, are really responsible for the whole trouble. _Medical outfit of the social worker_