Financial Capability in Early Social Work Practice: Lessons for Today.

During the profession's first decades, social workers tried to improve their clients' financial capability (FC). This article describes the methods used by early social workers who attempted to enhance the FC of their clients, based on contemporary descriptions of their practice. Social workers initially emphasized thrift, later adding more sophisticated consideration of the cost of foods, rent, and other necessities. Social work efforts were furthered by home economists, who served as specialists in nutrition, clothing, interior design, and other topics related to homemaking. Early home economists included specialists in nutrition and family budgeting; these specialists worked with social services agencies to provide a financial basis for family budgets and assisted clients with family budgeting. Some agencies engaged home economists as consultants and as direct providers of instruction on home budgets for clients. By the 1930s, however, social work interest in family budget problems focused on the psychological meaning of low income to the client, rather than in measures to increase client FC. Consequently, social workers' active engagement with family budget issues­engagement that characterized earlier decades­faded. These early efforts can inform contemporary practice as social workers are once again concerned about improving their clients' FC.

'These schemes will win for themselves the confidence of the people': irish independence, poor law reform and hospital provision.

This article examines hospital provision in Ireland during the early twentieth century. It examines attempts by the newly independent Irish Free State to reform and de-stigmatise medical relief in former workhouse infirmaries. Such reforms were designed to move away from nineteenth century welfare regimes which were underpinned by principles of deterrence. The reform initiated in independent Ireland - the first attempted break-up of the New Poor Law in Great Britain or Ireland - was partly successful. Many of the newly named County and District Hospitals provided solely for medical cases and managed to dissociate such health care provision from the relief of poverty. However, some hospitals continued to act as multifunctional institutions and provided for various categories including the sick, the aged and infirm, 'unmarried mothers' and 'harmless lunatics'. Such institutions often remained associated with the relief of poverty. This article also examines patient fee-payment and outlines how fresh terms of entitlement and means-testing were established. Such developments were even more pronounced in voluntary hospitals where the majority of patients made a financial contribution to their treatment. The article argues that the ability to pay at times determined the type of provision, either voluntary or rate-aided, available to the sick. However, it concludes that the clinical condition of patients often determined whether they entered a more prestigious voluntary hospital or the former workhouse. Although this article concentrates on two Irish case studies, County Kerry and Cork City; it is conceptualised within wider developments with particular reference to the British context.

[Physicians' households in the 16th century]. / Arztehaushalte im 16. Jahrhundert. Einkünfte, Status und Praktiken der Repräsentation.

16th-century's medicine was marked by a wave of professionalization: besides scientific influences--evident by new ambitious texts on botany, anatomy, and chemiatry--functions of medical expertise for political purposes were an important factor. Based on findings made in my DFG-funded project "Arztliche Autorität in der Frühen Neuzeit" (medical authority in early modem times) is discussed how these influences altered the professional conditions for physicians. "Haushalt" (household) can be understood as a social community as well as a monetary budget in this context: physicians earned their money with a lot of different ventures beside medical practice, as commerce, farming, banking, or mining etc. Expenses for houses, gardens, interior etc. were based on needs of everyday life but could also be signs of luxury. Thus the physicians demonstrated the high social status they had acquired, and some of them thereby placed themselves at one social level with the nobility. Even scientific books can be estimated as a special case of such a conspicuous consumption for in most cases publishing made high investments without monetary benefit necessary. Thus scientific reputation was to some degree foreseeable: epoch-making books like above all Andreas Vesalius' "De humani Corporis fabrica libri septem" (Basel 1543) had to be financed out of the assets of the family (in Vesalius' case: a high-standing family in the emperor's services). Other sources show clearly that many doctors were not able to afford publishing comparable elaborated and expensive books.