Historical PerspectiveBackground Of Medical Social Work The Birth

Historical Perspective/Background Of Medical Social Work

The Birth of Social Work in Health Care • Social work in health care began in the hospital setting in 1905 when a nurse, Garnet I. Pelton, was appointed by a physician, Richard C. Cabot, to fill the first hospital social worker position at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in the International Medicine Clinic. • Two years later, in 1907, social work services were placed in the Neurology Clinic of MGH, and this event is sometimes heralded as the beginning of Social Work in mental health. • However, there is little evidence that anyone at the time made a distinction between Medical and Psychiatric Social Work.

• According to Ida Cannon (1923), who soon succeeded Garnet Pelton in the social worker position and became a pioneer in hospital social work. • The birth of social work in hospitals was closely related to the extension of medical practice from the physician’s office and home visits to the hospital as the setting for medical diagnosis and treatment. • An effect of this change, which occurred around the turn of the twentieth century, was what Cannon called “a constriction of the field of vision” of the physician.

• The physician was cut off from observation of patients in the context of their homes, work, and other life situations. • Thus, the physician was left to focus primarily on physical factors. • Social work in hospitals was conceptualized as a means of compensating for this deficit by having its practitioners provide reports to the medical and nursing staff describing the patient’s home and work situations.

• According to Cannon, Dr. Cabot saw the potential for social work in hospitals to be “a potent means for more accurate diagnosis and more effective treatment”. • Cannon described this function of hospital social work: “It seeks to understand to treat the social complications of disease by establishing a close relationship between the medical care of patients in hospitals or dispensaries and the services of those skilled in the profession of social work, to bring to the institutionalized care of the sick such personal knowledge of their social condition as will hasten and safeguard their recovery. ”

• In a speech titled “Hospital and Dispensary Social Work” delivered at the International Conference of Social Work held in Paris, France, in July 1928, Dr. Cabot agreed that a primary function of hospital social work was to teach doctors and nurses about “the social and psychological aspects of disease”.