PEDIATRICS Vol. 7 No. 3 March 1951, pp. 449-452
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PUBLIC HEALTH, NURSING AND MEDICAL SOCIAL WORK

PEDIATRICS, SOCIAL WORK AND PSYCHIATRY; OVERLAPPING DISCIPLINES

Editors: MYRON E. WEGMAN, M.D..

THE physician's special knowledge becomes of value to the patient only as it is applied through the "physician-patient relationship." Similarly, medical social workers have specific information about the social implications of disease processes. To be useful to clients this information must be applied through an inter-personal "worker-client relationship." Both relationships involve a rapport between individuals based on an awareness of what the content of the interview means subjectively, as well as objectively, to the client or patient. The inter-personal relationship, it seems to me, is of the essence in all professional work. It involves the lawyer, minister and architect. At its best, it is based on a sound, studied knowledge of personality structure. Here and there throughout the land pioneering efforts are being made to include, as an integral part of professional training, courses whose purpose it is to teach beginning professional students about the structure of the personality and simultaneously, as part of this process, give them insight into their own personality traits. It is inevitable that through this increased insight the students themselves are helped to mature. In numerous medical schools psychiatry is being included in the freshman year's curriculum in an effort to accomplish the same function. I believe that a course dealing with "Growth and Change" would serve medical students even more adequately than an early introduction to psychiatry, helpful as that may be, because the individual's growth and change involves too many values which are not primarily psychiatric, and psychiatry too many concepts not relevant to an orientation course.