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
Another moral poisoning is _the sense of injustice_, a sense that it is
not right that somebody else, whom the Lord did not make very different,
has so much more of money and opportunity and happiness than the person
himself has. It is altogether a secondary question to discuss whether
that is true or not. I do not myself believe that the rich are any
happier than the poor. On the whole, I think the evils of money are just
as great as the evils of poverty. But the sense of injustice is often
just as real even though the reasoning on which it is based is wrong;
and the sense of injustice is a moral poison which breaks down health
and spoils happiness.
Can we do anything about it? Sometimes. By going over the details of
people's lives, by telling them stories of other people's lives, by
confessing a great deal about our own life, we can help people to see
things differently. When I was speaking of pains in the region of the
heart I said that one of the most important things that one could learn
is _to distinguish between the pain and what we think of it_. The pain
often cannot be changed, but our interpretation of it often can. The
patient often suffers chiefly from what he thinks of the pain, and when
he knows that the pain is not due to heart disease and that he probably
will live to be a hundred, that particular form of suffering leaves him.
So in this matter of the sense of injustice, the causes for suffering
may be unchangeable, but if we can change the patient's point of view we
may help him a great deal.
A greater evil, I think, than any I have mentioned, and one that we are
almost powerless to attack, is lowered sex standards, which come from
the crowding of people of all ages and both sexes into industry. As in
the housing problem, it is the moral rather than the physical side of
crowding that is most serious.
That is why the visiting part of social work seems to me so much the
most important. The important part is what we hope goes on in home
visits, when the social assistant meets people where they will talk as
of course they cannot talk in the dispensary.
_PART_ II
SOCIAL TREATMENT
CHAPTER VIII
SAMPLES OF SOCIAL THERAPEUTICS
1. _Order in social treatment_
The principles of linkage embodied in the work of the home visitor, in
her cooperation with doctors and other social workers, and in good
history-taking which avoids the fallacies of the catastrophic point of
view, take on a little more impressiveness when we consider what a
widely general law that "linking-up" law is. It is the essence of
science; indeed, it is the essence of things still wider, for it is the
essence of order.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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