their determined purpose and of their abounding faith in the unseen?

That is the type evolved by scientific discipline, a discipline the full rigor of which must be experienced to be appreciated. If ever you feel inclined to belittle the work of scientific men, or to believe the legends of their brutality and materialism, go and look into the faces of any gathering of them, and listen to their work. I think you will be convinced, as I am, that no small part of the seed of the God-fearing Puritans has taken root and is flourishing in the rigorous asceticism of the modern scientific investigator. We accept the fruits of his labors, and live on them like parasites, but we do not often stop to acknowledge our indebtedness, still less to realize that the work has been done by minds disciplined by a degree of selfdenial, a degree of renunciation of the world and its rewards, before which you and I should quail.

VII

I have set foreground and background apart, and described them separately, as if it were true that the more one sees of the one, the less the other is visible. But, of course, that is not so. The man who has a clear sense of the individuality and sacredness of each person and each moment of time will yet run into confusion and distortion unless he backs his foreground view with the vista of the distant, the past and the future, the background of the community life out of which this individual has emerged and to which he belongs. The only justice to one in- · dividual is justice to all. The only true consideration of one is consideration of all.

The humanitarian and the scientific sides of our work need each other as man and woman do. Science without humanity becomes arid and, finally, discouraged.

Humanity without science becomes scrappy and shallow.

No one ought to be satisfied to test his work by any easier standards than these: First. Am I seeing all the actual facts, the ever-new and unique facts, the crying and immediate needs as they come before me?

Second. Am I tracing out as far and as deep as I can the full bearing, the true lesson, the unseen spirit of this moment, this situation, this calamity, this illness?

Am I using my eyes and ears, my sympathies and my imagination, as hard as I can? Am I searching for the deepest meaning, the widest bearing, the furthest connection of these facts? Am I seeing and helping as truly as I can the foreground and the background of my work?

CHAPTER II

THE NATURE OF SOCIAL WORK, ESPECIALLY IN ITS RELATION TO MEDICINE

As soon as we open our eyes to the backgrounds of medical work such as I exemplified in the last chapter, social, educational, and preventive activities begin to loom up round us in deep vistas which we cannot reasonably refuse to explore. A man is not flat like a card. We cannot get the whole of him spread out upon our retina at once. The bit of him which is recorded in the history of his aches, his jumps, and his weaknesses is built into the rest of his life and character like a stone in an arch. To change any part of him appreciably we must change the whole. As well might one try to pick up a man's shadow and carry it away as to treat his

physical ills by themselves without knowledge of the habits that so often help to make him sick and the character of which these habits are the fruit.

Yet physicians and hospital managers have only just begun to realize this because the inquiry into the ultimate causes and results of disease has not yet gathered much momentum. The question:

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Why does this disease occur at all?" is

still thought of as one which a few paid officials or virtuous amateurs may well bestir themselves to answer, provided they have the time and provided they do it without disturbing the practical work of the busy physician. The average practitioner is used to seeing his patients flash by him like shooting stars-out of darkness into darkness. He has been trained to focus upon a single suspected organ till he thinks of his patients almost like disembodied diseases.

"What is there in the waiting-room?"