A New Profession.

Prior to the 1900s what we now know as social work was done by amateurs, well-intentioned women and men who lacked formal training but possessed a desire to help those they viewed as less fortunate than themselves. But in the 1900s the field was transformed by the application of new knowledge and methods to the problems of poverty, vice, disease, alcoholism, and other social ills. Many of these new approaches were generated by social scientists such as Edward A. Ross at the University of Wisconsin, who had been trained in Europe, and in turn trained a young generation of men and women in economics and sociology. While many were educated at what were still known as schools of philanthropy, social workers made every effort to distance themselves from their roots in the voluntaristic tradition of the rich helping the poor. Instead, they saw themselves as professional investigators equipped with tools that...