What is printed here is meant to give a sample, not a full account, of medical-history-taking. Competence in this field takes long practice. Nevertheless the intelligent social worker can learn in a few weeks to be of great assistance to the doctor by taking either in the dispensary or in the home such histories as I have sketched. In social-history-taking there is no single order or schedule of questions agreed upon by all social workers. But there should be _some_ order and system determined partly by the personality of the worker and partly by the nature of the trouble. If poverty or destitution is the presenting symptom, one must find out the items in the family budget, the figures of income and outgo, paying especial attention as in medical histories to the question, "_How long?_" How long have you paid that rent, earned that wage, been without a job, taken boarders, been in debt? Is sickness, childbirth, alcoholism, injury a factor? Is there any family history of tuberculosis, pleurisy, insanity, epilepsy, feeble-mindedness? Of miscarriages or of "scrofulous" children and "blood diseases"? What previous hard times? What economic and moral high-water marks and low-water marks can we trace in the past history? What relatives, friends, employers, doctors, teachers, neighbors, landlords, social agencies, public officials or records can be consulted for additional light on the person and his troubles? From all these sources one arrives finally at an opinion on "_what sort of person_ are we trying to help--what sort physically, mentally, and morally?" That is the central fact. CHAPTER III ECONOMIC INVESTIGATION BY THE SOCIAL ASSISTANT It should be clear from what I have said already that the work of the social assistant _may_ have nothing to do with poverty. Her only business in visiting a family may be to assist the doctor in his diagnosis and treatment by bringing him additional facts about the nature, seriousness, or cause of the disease and about the means by which it may be combated. But in many, perhaps most, of the families whom the social assistant attempts to befriend, there is a call for relief, for financial assistance, for money, food, coal, and clothes. This appeal like most medical appeals is apt to take the _form of an emergency_. Help (we are told over the telephone) is needed at once, or disaster will follow. The family is eager for immediate relief, not for a slow and painstaking investigation of the causes which have led up to the present state of things, or of the exact nature of their present troubles. They are like the sick in this respect. Prompt relief from pain is what the sick demand, not the tedious processes of questioning and examination. They want a remedy, a pain-killer, morphine or its equivalent.