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
In America, on the other hand, the conspicuous disregard of medical
psychology by physicians has led to widespread and serious revolt on the
part of the public. Our physicians have too often treated the patient as
if he were a walking disease, a body without a mind. Medical psychology
has been neglected in our medical schools and in the practice of our
most successful clinicians. The result has been a revolt upon the part
of the laity, expressed in the popularity of the heretical healing cults
such as Christian Science and New Thought. These unscientific and
unchristian organizations illustrate an error opposite to that of the
physicians, but no greater in degree. Indeed, I think that our
physicians are more to be blamed than the leaders of these irrational
cults, because our physicians having received a scientific training
ought to be more thorough, more unprejudiced, more devoted to the truth,
and therefore less inclined to shut their eyes to a huge body of facts.
The physician often shuts his eyes to the existence of the mind as a
cause of disease. The Christian Scientist shuts his eyes to the
existence of the body as a cause of disease. Both are equally and
disastrously wrong. But the medical profession is on the whole more to
blame, because they ought to know better, whereas the heretical healing
cults have grown up among uneducated men who could not be expected to
avoid the sort of narrowness and prejudice from which liberal education
ought to free us.
The situation in America, then, is very different and on the whole worse
than in France. There, scientific men, educated physicians have taken
the leadership in the field of medical psychology. In America it has
been left for ignorant enthusiasts, devoid of any scientific training or
breadth of culture, to press upon our attention the neglected elements
of medical practice, and to lead a revolt against the medical
profession, an anti-scientific revolution which numbers its adherents by
millions. But in neither country has our established knowledge of the
mental elements of disease been properly incorporated into medical
practice, especially into the practice of dispensary physicians, and it
is here that the social worker forms an essential link in the chain of
effective action. Let me describe more completely what I mean by the
mental element in disease.
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