Human intervention

“ Think, friends, what it would be—yes, what it will be, when all the rough, sturdy men of danger, living every hour in the face of accident and death, shall know what to do in the moment for his writhing companion in toil; when the homes—the children in the streets and in the schools—shall all possess the knowledge which this method of human beneficence teaches—this is First Aid—this is what it stands for—the lessons which it inculcates and its faithful apostles teach. ”

“ Society has done that by a system of care which is pre-prenatal, by seeing to it that every human being grows up in the best possible environment and receives the best possible nutrition, and by prophylactic measures of all possible sorts. ”

“ But the scope of its service extends well beyond the provision of emergency care. Its broader mission is clear: to promote compassion, to foster a spirit of generosity, and to improve the human condition everywhere. ”

“ The few in both sections who have tried to stand in the way of human betterment and adaptation to the conditions of the world's advancement have had to suffer the consequences of their rashness and be dropped from the rolls of the promoters of the nation's welfare. ”

“ But we are now considering a subject so fundamental in human welfare, so much wider than any class interest, that any variety of opinion respecting it, is of vital importance to be noted, and must be recognised by all intelligent persons. ”

“ A State may take measures to ensure the medical profession and its members are viewed as healers, sustained by a compassionate and rigorous ethic and cognizant of the dignity and value of human life, even life which cannot survive without the assistance of others. ”

“ Yes, infinitely more powerful than any isolated rebuke, or warning, or intervention, is the force of united Christian example and protecting aid, to keep in the right path the halt, the maimed, the blind. ”

“ Intervention is, and will remain, an act of physical, material force, and history largely teaches that Intervention, even for higher moral purposes, was always exercised by the strong against the weak, the strong always invoking "higher motives." ”

“ On the average and the large scale, the professions which heal and prevent disease, and mitigate suffering, call for much more ability, constancy, and devotion than the professions which inflict wounds and death and all sorts of human misery. ”

“ My present object, however, is to set out some elementary—and when stated fairly obvious—considerations bearing on social evils and their remedies under present conditions of society, the recollection of which if followed by practical action, would secure greatly increased efficiency in social work. ”

“ Science has already so completely demonstrated its vast fruitfulness in human welfare, that it must be watched with jealous vigilance. It must result as it began, in the improvement of human welfare. [1] But what constitutes human welfare is a question which leads us into the final activity of the Career of Reason, Morals and Moral Valuation, man's attempt to determine what happiness is, and how he may attain it. ”

“ Suppose now that society suddenly awoke to the great want so long unnoticed, that it was recognized by all that a scientific knowledge of the human frame in health and in disease, and a study of the remedies of various kinds which might be employed as curative agents, would greatly lessen human suffering, and that it was therefore resolved at once to set apart some persons who should acquire such knowledge, and devote their lives to using it for the benefit of the rest of the race. ”

“ Habit, both of thought and action, is exceedingly powerful. I will, therefore, confine myself chiefly to those efforts at prevention, from which much more is to be hoped, in the present state of society, than from direct attempts at cure. ”

“ Human needs, human instincts, and human perceptions do not alter in their nature, and the dislocations of intricate social adjustments, which follow from the natural course of historic development, will not prove beyond the skill of social surgery to reduce, if the need is recognized for encyclopædic wisdom in the professors of the healing art. ”

“ Society will take over unto itself the oversight not only of physical training and of providing that children shall be well born but also more and more the oversight of the treatment of disease, as a public necessity. ”

“ The proverb that "Prevention is better than cure," to which everybody gives unhesitating assent, but which is often forgotten in practice, lies at the root of most of the reforms, both moral and physical, effected by the Tootmanyoso. ”

“ The public care little for medical titles, or for those artificial distinctions which, for the more convenient subdivision of labour, we have established amongst ourselves; they look for men who will prove useful to them in time of need—men in whom they can place confidence, whom they may admit without fear into the bosom of their families, whose feelings and behaviour are those of gentlemen, who are skilled to relieve their bodily sufferings, and to whom they may open the secrets of their hearts and turn for sympathy and advice in seasons of affliction. ”

“ It implies an ability to subordinate the individual to the general welfare, to sacrifice present comfort to future good, to decide whether an act is right or wrong by making it general, to put all questions on an impersonal basis. ”

“ Uncertain of themselves until they made sure of the sciences upon which their future work was to develop, social workers since the commencement of organized social work in this country demanded of the sciences concerned with the human mind some information that might aid them in dealing with the difficult problems in human adaptation which they found constituted the chief part of social work. ”

“ Work is the inevitable condition of human life, the true source of human welfare. ”

“ I have spoken of the work of prevention, of the more important work of substitution, and I now come to the most important of all—the spirit of confidence which extended from top to bottom of the huge organization that the great mass of our men would go straight for the sake of going straight. ”

“ The profession, with a disinterestedness and devotion to science worthy of liberal minds, combines to make the prevention of disease its aim, even beyond its cure. It forms a noble co-operative society. ”

“ The medical worker and the medical investigator, for example, will be building up the body of a new generation, the body of the civilized state, and he will be doing all he can, not simply as an individual, but as a citizen, to ORGANIZE his services of cure and prevention, of hygiene and selection. A great and growing multitude of men will be working out the apparatus of the civilized state ”

“ Higher standards of individual efficiency and comfort. The physical welfare of the individual has been promoted to a greater degree, or at all events preached more eloquently, within the last few generations than ever before. ”

“ After consultations with all these sectors, we have determined the need for three basic types of intervention. The first is to give the poor access to quality basic services -- the very imperatives of survival for people living on the margin. ”

“ So, at least, it will be if in your early studies you have fixed your eyes upon the ultimate end from which those studies take their chief value—that of making you more effective combatants in the great fight which never~ceases to rage between Good and Evil, and more equal to coping with the ever new problems which the changing course of human nature and human society present to be resolved. ”

“ Care should be exercised lest any hindrance, should, for any reason, be placed in the way of those who have, whether young or old, rich or poor, so spontaneously dedicated themselves to so urgent and holy a mission. ”

“ The constant references to programs, standards and experience, to records and the search for causes, the emphasis on prevention and the patient, objective, therapeutic attitude of the social worker all testify to the conquest of the field by science. ”

“ Confronted with people's troubles, whether physical or mental or spiritual, we are tempted, and above all they are tempted to regard the sickness, the poverty, or the sorrow in the light of an emergency, an accident, and therefore as something to be treated at once and by means which have little to do with the past and the future. On the other hand, the standpoint of science and philosophy, and of any one who has labored long in the field of social work with [Pg 29] or without science or philosophy, is the point of view of history. ”

“ Since then, the resources for treatment directed to the mind have been developed as steadily and fully as those required for the treatment of physical conditions. The use of the organized agencies which were regarded by the founders as the main reliance in moral treatment, namely occupations, physical exercises and games, diversion, social contacts, and enjoyment, and management of behavior has been greatly extended, and specialized departments have been created for their application with system and growing precision. ”

“ It requires but little thought to feel that the wise physician who shall trace out the true causes of suffering; who shall teach us the great, immutable laws of life and health; who shall show us how and where in our every-day life, we are violating these laws, and the true point to begin the reform, is doing a much higher, broader, and deeper work than he who shall bend all his energies to the temporary relief of suffering. ”

“ Or you might build a splendid marble palace of a hospital or asylum, and herd together vast numbers of little boys or fallen women or cripples, and try in some big, mechanical, institutional way to do with your pound of cure what an ounce of prevention would have accomplished a thousand times better, if it could have come in the way of justice, not charity. ”

“ If control is the cement of every social system and if it is the highest aim of mental hygiene, it follows that control should be the highest aim of legislation and custom, which together make up social hygiene. ”

“ They must consider the individual who is in need or the charitable body which makes an appeal, as carefully as a physician considers his case; they must get the facts for a right diagnosis, and bring to the cure all the resources of civilization. ”

“ In saying as much as we have already said, in placing our melancholy conviction on record in this way, we lay ourselves open to the charge of prejudging the most important decision affecting the welfare of mankind that any body of men have ever been called upon to make. ”

“ A revolution of sentiment and practice is demanded, in which the inebriate and the conditions which developed his malady shall be understood; then the means for prevention, restoration, and recovery can be applied along the line of nature's laws. ”

“ It stands to reason that those who have brought us up and watched over us in helpless infancy or in sickness, instructed us and fitted us to enter on the active duties of life, must feel far greater interest in our future welfare than can any other person. ”

“ That which, when we become capable of reflection, we term conscience, consists in pleasure in forms of action furthering the welfare of society—forms gradually moulded to habit with the development of social relations,—and in a corresponding pain at the realization of having failed of such action; the knowledge of the demand, by society as a whole or by a part of society, of action in accord with the general welfare, and the sense of the justice of this demand, constituting the feeling of obligation and duty. ”

“ They illustrate once for all the need for partnership between all well-wishers of humanity in this work, and the importance of combined effort by the sociologist and the physician, as well as of experts in each branch of sanitation, if all attainable success is to be attained. ”

“ But practice assigns the most contradictory things to different people at different times as means to their welfare. What is welfare in one place, is disaster in another, and vice versa. Understanding, or reason, has nothing else to do in the matter than to number these various welfares as they are made real by sense perceptions in various persons and times, and degrees of intensity, in the order in which they appear, and thus to distinguish the small from the great, the essential from the unessential, the concrete from the general. ”

“ The different welfares, in so far as their beneficent qualities are concerned, are to be distinguished only by their height and breadth, by the quantity of their dimensions, by their numeral relations. Every welfare, whether true or seeming, is perceived by the senses, by practices of life, not by abstract reason. ”

“ The medical profession should be made to understand the importance of public health work, should have a general comprehension of the methods used in its execution and should particularly develop a sympathetic and co-operative mental attitude. ”

“ There is need for further instruction of the public in all branches of hygiene; and we need, if we are to be efficient in social work, to follow the advice of Oliver Wendell Holmes, to remove the intellectual membrana nictitans from our eyes, and to consider the physical and moral as well as the intellectual obstacles to health. ”

“ We can take care of isolated cases of rebellion. But if any important part of the country rises up and departs, it is exceedingly difficult to know what to do. Prevention is excellent; but cure is next to impossible. ”

“ If society is to progress on a truly humanistic basis, without being subject to mental epidemics and virulent social diseases to which the subconscious falls an easy victim, the personal consciousness of every individual should be cultivated to the highest degree possible. ”

“ The complicated interests which surround most of the great social and moral problems demand the most careful and patient study, and only he who has brought to these tasks the forces of a well-trained mind can suggest the true means of relief from conditions which all may recognize as deplorable. ”

“ We have passed from giving mere wholesale advice to a conscientious study of the problems of each unit, and at the same time we have developed a new and sensible approach to mental hygiene and prevention, as expressed in the comprehensive surveys of State and community work and even more clearly in the development of helps to individuals in finding themselves, and in the work in schools to reach those who need a special adaptation of aims and means. ”