Medical social service has been assuming a position of increasing importance in the last few years until it has become an indispensible adjunct to diagnosis, treatment and teaching. It supplies to the clinician the intimate contact with the daily life and social conditions of the patient which is held by the family physician, and without which, while he may diagnose and treat the disease, he cannot "treat the patient." A clinician in a psychiatric clinic recently stated that diagnosis in the clinic had improved 20 per cent. since the organization of their social service department.
Medical social work must always remain much of an art to be gained by experience; but its methods and aims are scientific, and these may be formulated in a text, as well as the general methods of procedure and the results of the experience of the author.
There has been a very definite need of