Social DiagnosisMary E. Richmond's (1917) scholarly work, Social Diagnosis, is a 511-page comprehensive approach to social work in the early 20th century. This book provided a systematic framework for social work by formulating questionnaires regarding almost every aspect of the profession for use in launching services. The author expressed the specific intention of providing a common ground for all social workers so that they could “develop knowledge and mastery of these elements” (p. 5). Although a condensed version of the book is certainly beyond the scope of this article, a brief summary is in order. Two appendices, a bibliography and a detailed index complete the twenty-eight chapters of the work. Richmond has divided the book into three parts. The first part looks at the history of social work investigations and explains how workers gather information used to decide to whom services should be provided. Part two covers the process of interviewing candidates, gathering information from other sources, and how to think about that information. gathered during these processes to draw conclusions about client eligibility and planning. He also begins to address the philosophical bases of social work. Richmond (1917) stated: "Individual differences must be taken into account in all fields of activity, but the theory of the broader self, although of course it has other implications, seems to be the basis of work on social cases. We have seen how slowly these works abandoned their few general classifications to try to consider man as a whole. Slower still, we realize that the spirit of man (and, in a very real sense, the spirit is man) can be described as the sum of his social relations. (p. 368) In the third part, q...... middle of document ...... lock grants. Richmond (1917) repeatedly urged social workers to take a holistic approach in formulating a diagnosis that would eventually lead to intervention to help consumers become self-reliant. Awareness of the environment in which one was working was evident from the encyclopedic nature of the range of questionnaires provided. This was not known at the time as an ecological approach, but it certainly had all the hallmarks of such an approach. Although no one would have used the term psychotherapy to describe the operation of social work at the time, behavioral goals were obviously part of the planning process, and the author could well have adopted many of those described in the planners modern therapeutics (Wodarski, et al., 2001) used by today's social workers. Thus, Richmond anticipated many of the problems social workers face to this day..