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THEOLOGICAL LIBRARY

MAY 10 1917

HARVARD

DIVINITY SCHOOL

144.757

COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY
THE RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION

WM F. FELL CO PRINTERS
PHILADELPHIA

ΤΟ

ZILPHA DREW SMITH

WHOSE STEADY FAITH IN THE POSSIBILITIES OF SOCIAL CASE WORK HAS BEEN THE INSPIRA

TION OF THIS BOOK AND OF ITS AUTHOR

One of the most striking facts with regard to the conscious life of any human being is that it is interwoven with the lives of others. It is in each man's social relations that his mental history is mainly written, and it is in his social relations likewise that the causes of the disorders that threaten his happiness and his effectiveness and the means for securing his recovery are to be mainly sought.

-DR. JAMES JACKSON PUTNAM

No matter how mean or hideous a man's life is, the first thing is to understand him; to make out just how it is that our common human nature has come to work out in this way. This method calls for patience, insight, firmness, and confidence in men, leaving little room for the denunciatory egotism of a certain kind of reformers. It is more and more coming to be used in dealing with intemperance, crime, greed, and in fact all those matters in which we try to make ourselves and our neighbors better.

-CHARLES HORTON COOLEY

Only the sham knows everything; the trained man understands how little the mind of any individual may grasp, and how many must co-operate in order to explain the very simplest things.

-HANS GROSS

F

PREFACE

IFTEEN years ago, I began to take notes, gather illustra

tions, and even draft a few chapters for a book on Social

Work in Families. In it I hoped to pass on to the younger people coming into the charity organization field an explanation of the methods that their seniors had found useful. It soon became apparent, however, that no methods or aims were peculiarly and solely adapted to the treatment of the families that found their way to a charity organization society; that, in essentials, the methods and aims of social case work were or should be the same in every type of service, whether the subject was a homeless paralytic, the neglected boy of drunken parents, or the widowed mother of small children. Some procedures, of course, were peculiar to one group of cases and some to another, according to the special social disability under treatment. But the things that most needed to be said about case work were the things that were common to all. The division of social work into departments and specialties was both a convenience and a necessity; fundamental resemblances remained, however.

With other practitioners-with physicians and lawyers, for example there was always a basis of knowledge held in common. If a neurologist had occasion to confer with a surgeon, each could assume in the other a mastery of the elements of a whole group of basic sciences and of the formulated and transmitted experience of his own guild besides. But what common knowledge could social workers assume in like case? This was my query of fifteen years ago. It seemed to me then, and it is still my opinion, that the elements of social diagnosis, if formulated, should constitute a part of the ground which all social case workers could occupy in common, and that it should become possible in time to take for granted, in every social practitioner, a knowledge and mastery of those elements, and of the modifications in them which each decade of practice would surely bring.

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