he arrogates any especial merit to himself.

VI

Once thoroughly equipped and recognized as an expert in the understanding and management of the weaknesses and perversions of character, the social worker should command expert fees. He should have his office hours and his private practice as well as his public work among the poor. He should be consulted as Mark Fagan used to be consulted, as Professor Royce is often consulted, by rich and poor, in all sorts of moral and domestic difficulties, by the parents of difficult children, by the children of difficult parents, and also by many neurasthenics seen in consultation with physicians. The average social worker is, in my opinion, far better equipped to treat neurasthenia than the average physician is. The mental and moral aspects of such cases altogether

overshadow their physical aspects, and the problems of occupation, of encouragement, of foresight, hindsight, and of responsible living are just what the social worker is constantly encountering.

I see no reason why social work should be done chiefly among the poor. My most intimate and thorough knowledge of the topic has been gained through the social work done by my wife on me. Social work (the understanding and molding of faulty character) is possible, I know, because I have experienced it in the hands of an expert.

CHAPTER III

TEAM-WORK OF DOCTOR, EDUCATOR, AND

SOCIAL WORKER, AND THE RESULTING CHANGES IN THE THREE PROFESSIONSA REVIEW AND A PROGRAMME

DESPITE the distinctions emphasized in the last chapter, history shows that medical work and social work are branches split off from a common trunk:-the care of people in trouble. In earlier centuries the priest healed the sick, cared for the poor, taught the ignorant, and often led his people in industrial, governmental, and even in martial activities. He was the lawgiver and magistrate, the doctor, the school-teacher, the dispenser of charity, the temporal ruler, and sometimes the leader in war. Such all-inclusive usefulness in the priesthood still lingers here and

there among us. Father Nisco in the little town of Roseto, Penn. (see McClure's Magazine, January, 1908), is doing something very like this now. He is the leader of his town in industrial, municipal, and political life as well as in educational and spiritual affairs.

In a similar way, the country doctor, the old-fashioned family physician, has sometimes extended his profession as widely and deeply as the priest was once allowed to do. Barrie and Watson have described such doctors and many of us have known them, leaders in all civic work.

But specialization of work and division of labor have come into the field once occupied alone by the minister or the doctor. The doctor is now supposed to care for the diseased body, the teacher for the undeveloped mind, the minister for the needy soul, the social worker for the poor, while justice and governmental work are likewise intrusted to specialists. On the

whole, doubtless, this division of labor is good for every resulting profession except that of the minister, but what I wish here to point out is that in this field, as in many others, division of labor is never an unmixed blessing and may easily become a curse unless energy and intelligence are devoted to the ways and means of attaining a close co-operation and interchange of ideas, methods, and plans among the divided laborers.

There is a distinction and an important one between the troubles of mind, of body, and of estate; but there is also a unity among them. Hence no one can give the most efficient aid to a diseased body, a distracted or undeveloped mind, or a needy family without crossing the dividing lines and laboring in fields assigned primarily to others. A doctor needs to know something of social work and of the spiritual and mental life of his patients. A social worker must know something of physi