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
But if such fears haunt the students about to enter Harvard College, who
are young men drawn from the better educated and more well-to-do
classes, we may be sure that fear plays even a larger part in producing
the sufferings of patients such as we examine and treat in a public
dispensary. For such patients are very apt to be influenced by
groundless rumors, panics, neighborhood gossip. They are prone to
believe medical lies which they read in newspapers and in the leaflets
and circulars sent to them by charlatans. Almost all their medical
education comes to them from such sources, and is made up of a mass of
systematic falsehoods designed to excite fear and to produce symptoms by
suggestion.
Now if it is true that even among educated and relatively
self-conscious classes the most troublesome and incapacitating fears are
those which are but dimly known to the patient himself, this is sure to
be still more frequently the case among dispensary patients. It is
especially difficult and especially important, therefore, that their
fears should be understood and brought to light through the
investigations of some one who has time, patience, and tact to devote to
the task. This cannot be the task of the physician who sees neurological
cases in the dispensary, any more than the psychological twists and
tangles of the tuberculous patient can be followed out by the specialist
in tuberculosis who examines the patient's lungs. It is the proper task
of the social worker. When she has brought the patient's fears to light,
when she understands the details of his malady, she can communicate
these facts to the physician. He then can exorcise the unclean spirits
with the full authority of his medical position.
Just here one sees a good example of the proper coöperation between the
physician and the social worker in the dispensary. Each brings to light
certain elements in the diagnosis. But in the end the physician must
unite all the knowledge accumulated either by himself or by his social
assistants, and thus must be enabled to act for the patient's benefit on
the basis of a body of information much larger than he could have
secured alone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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